Eye Spied
by Blue Shadowdancer
Summary: Stella's kidnapped and alone in the dark. Mac's searching for her, but he may not be in time...
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Hi, thanks for reading! This is my new chapter story, a little strange, but I hope you like it nonetheless. Please do let me know what you think, good or bad.**

**Thanks to lily moonlight and chrysalis escapist for reading through and encouraging me to post this.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. Much as I'd like to.**

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She opened her eyes. And then she tried to open them again, because there was no change for her between closed and open.

There was only darkness.

It didn't make sense. There was a fog inside her head, and all her thoughts felt only half-formed. Something had happened. She wasn't supposed to be here. Was supposed to know what was going on. But didn't.

She was drowning in a sea of ink, smothered by a mountain of soot, entombed in a block of jet. She could feel the heavy blackness pressing down on her skin, slithering into and out of her lungs, seeping through her pores, filtering in through the iris of her eyes.

Blackness slid through her veins and arteries, pounded through her heart.

Only darkness.

She opened her eyes again.

She felt her arms and legs move. She felt herself sit up, put her hand flat on what she was sitting on. Cold. Hard.

Black.

She knelt, or, at least, her body told her she was kneeling. She swept her arm around her in a wide circle, fingertips just brushing the roughness of the floor. There was nothing there, or if there was then her hand passed through it without resistance. The blackness in her blood thrummed loudly against her eardrums.

Slowly, her hand against the floor to push her up, she stood. But there was no reference, no plane in the dark, and she wavered unsteadily with no sightline to throw for balance. She took a tentative step forwards, and fell. The palms of her hands smacked down against the ground.

She opened her eyes. The gesture was still futile.

It would be safer to crawl, she decided. So she crawled forwards, one arm out in front of her to feel her way. The position made her feel like a child again, crawling in the dark. Feeling her way. Dark which, only a little more than an arm-span away, began to fill slowly but surely with the creatures from her nightmares, long swept away beneath the bed. When she moved she could hear the slithering of snakes, the loud hungry breath of nameless monsters. Spiders scuttled around and between her limbs but when she tried to squash them, pounding down with a tightly-clenched fist, they had moved away, and there was only the hardness, which hurt her hands.

The imagined sounds spread outwards from her mind, filling the sizeless space.

She stopped dead, and held her breath, suddenly knowing, _knowing_ that there was something waiting for her, maybe reaching out towards her, directly in front of her face. The shades and monsters beside her in the blackness froze with her, so still that she couldn't hear them, although their echoes in her memory pressed in around her. When, finally, the pain and pressure were overwhelming, she breathed out, in, as slowly and silently as she could. They breathed with her, exactly in time.

For long, stretched minutes she didn't dare to move. The fear of what might be waiting for her paralysed her, petrified her in the stone-coldness where she was. Her breaths were shallow. Not enough air.

Shuddering and biting her lips shut, she reached out a shaking hand. Her eyes were screwed tight shut, and without her noticing, her face had turned reflexively away. Her fingers moved through the air and found –

Nothing. There was nothing there.

She put both hands palm-down on the floor and leant forward, gasping heavily in relief. With an effort she tried to push the nightmare monsters out of her mind, telling herself to be logical. _Logical_. They were creatures of her imagination, and that was all. It had been years since she was afraid of the dark.

But this was beyond darkness. She let the clichés swim through her mind, welcomed them as a distraction. Pitch black. Dark as night. Black as soot. Cat in a coal cellar. She tried to hold an image in her mind, the sun, a tree, city lights. She pulled faces towards her, conjured up names to match. Mac. Hawkes. Sid. Flack. Danny. Mac. Mac. They span up towards her and then sank away. She _knew_ they were out there, somewhere, but they faded in her mind. Faded to black.

_They'll be looking for me. They'll find me soon_. She knew that. The fiercely rational part of her mind tried to convince the rest of her too, forcing determination. She couldn't stay curled up there. There might be a way out, and was she just going to wait for them? _No. Never. Mac'll expect more from me._

So she opened her eyes, as wide open as they would go, so that she couldn't miss seeing any light that happened to exist. Then she began crawling again, pushing herself through the deep pool of blackness. It felt far thicker than air should, as if she was crawling along the bottom of an ocean trench. The weight of the water threatened to smother her.

She hit something.

She jerked back, an automatic recoil. It hadn't been a wall her hand had just brushed against. Something soft, something which yielded under the light pressure of her hand. She froze. Waiting. Nothing moved.

Thoughts shrieked through her mind, but she knew all along that she would have to find out what it was, if only to quell the panic, the fear of one of the demons of the darkness sitting watching her. She thought furiously, _I'm not afraid. I'm a scientist. I want to know what's there,_ and surprised herself with the detachment with which she wondered momentarily whether denying fear made her a coward. It was that thought which gave her the courage to lean forward and place her right hand in what she thought was the place.

What it met was at first unfamiliar. About half a forearm-span from the floor she found a surface, cold and firm but yielding a little way to pressure, a smooth surface but not flat, curved, a harder projection coming out from it. There was a bewildering feeling in her mind that she should recognise what it was, but she couldn't.

Her moving fingers found a surface within the surface, a tighter, smaller curve. Colder, and slimy, with a rim that brushed and bent easily. The surface of a cold, moist globe, almost like… almost like…

Like…

She threw herself violently backwards, back into the blackness which at that moment was preferable to what was in front of her, what she was touching. Panic at last overwhelmed her and she screamed, screamed, shoving her left hand over and partly into her mouth to try and mute the sound, and to force down the gag reflex as she retched uncontrollably. She scraped her right hand frantically against the roughness of the floor, and then against her clothes, but she couldn't scrape away the feeling inside her.

She pulled herself up into a tight ball, as small as possible, trying to compress herself enough that the hideous sensation of the cold eyeball, staring blankly into the blackness, could be squeezed out of her mind.

It wasn't working.


	2. Chapter 2

**Hi, thank you very much for the reviews for the first chapter! And also thank you to those who have put this story on alert/ favourite. Please do continue to tell me what you think!**

**Apologies that this chapter and some of my review replies were a little late, my hand had an argument with a kettle. The kettle won. The next chapter won't be for a week, as I'm off on holiday, hopefully to somewhere with more sun! :)  
**

**Thanks to lily moonlight for reading through and making suggestions.**

* * *

She opened her eyes. Cold concrete pressed into her cheek. Had she slept? She wasn't sure. Couldn't be sure. Time may as well have stopped. Maybe it had.

She sat up, eyes still straining for some light, any light, any at all. Nothing. Still nothing. She touched her face, feeling the ridges and dents that had patterned themselves into her skin, imagined how they would look if she could see them, some sort of crazy tattoo.

One hand on the floor. Ran it over the uneven surface. It was smoothed – worn down by the passing of feet. A layer of dust, which her fingers glided across, dry grains which she felt leech onto her skin, into her fingerprints. Obscuring them.

Her breaths counted time for her, and her pulse beat against her eardrums. But there was nothing else to tell her that she was really there, was more than a figment of her own imagination, that her body had not already been absorbed into the darkness, ready to dissolve in the light.

_Don't think things like that._

She slapped the palm of her hand against the floor. A dead sound, which ricocheted off some unseen wall and returned to her. Her hand stung. But it still existed.

She shut her eyes, not that it made any difference, but to concentrate. What had happened? Why was she there? A memory rose up to meet her, and she clung to it with a drowning grip.

_It's early evening, and it's raining lightly in the square. Just light enough to make her feel that using an umbrella would be overkill, so there's a thin film of moisture beading on her face and sliding down her cheeks, pearls of water threaded into her curls. She pauses every now and then to wipe droplets from the screen of her camera using the cloth handkerchief she carries in her kit for this purpose; it's much better than using her sleeve, which is damp anyway and wouldn't help, or tissues, which dissolve too quickly, pulling apart into white fibres, which stick, and are worse than the water for obscuring her view._

_She straightens up, at the same time as Mac does. They're being watched, staring eyes of passer-bys and unblinking camera lenses, but they've both learnt to ignore them. The arrangement earlier was that she would stay working the scene with Flack while Mac drove back the first lot of evidence to the lab, but this case is open-and-shut, a single gunshot in full view of an eyewitness, and will require only one trip between them. Flack has gone to answer another callout. The shooter will be at the precinct, still coming down from his drug high._

_The victim will be at Angel Of Mercy. The thought brings a smile to her lips, because for once they're not working a murder scene, for once someone saw something happen and intervened, a man who, according to him, specialised in breaking up fights outside his bar at closing time, and therefore wasn't going to stand by when he saw a decidedly one-sided fight going on right in front of him. He'd tackled the junkie before he could either take the kill-shot or run away, shouting for another passer-by to phone for an ambulance, for police, even the fire brigade if they felt like it._

_Sometimes, not everyone walks by._

_She's thinking about this as she and Mac walk down the flight of steps from the paved area, back to the car. So busy thinking, in fact, that her foot slips on the rain-slick slab and she grabs for Mac's arm but misses, loses her balance, falls forward, falls…_

_And then… _ She searched her mind, but found nothing.

Was that really the last thing she remembered? She focused on it. No. It couldn't be. _Couldn't_ be. Because although she couldn't remember how that story ended, Mac had been there with her. He would have helped her up. Maybe laughed? No. Not Mac. He wouldn't have laughed.

Mac was with her then.

She opened her eyes.

What if.

There was a body. A dead body. (What other kind, in her line of work?) What if her memories _weren't_ playing tricks with her, and that fall down rain covered steps was truly the last thing that happened before she ended up here?

Because Mac was with her then.

Mac. Then…

She choked back noise, choked back thoughts which scuttled towards her, long feathery feelers outstretched to brush against her, a possessive caress of spider-silk. A light touch on her skin, at a hundred different nerve endings, so light that they were hardly there at all, but she batted her face, her hands, her arms too, because they were reaching her even through the thin knit of her pullover. But they were quicker than her and scuttled away again, back beyond the reach of her hands.

She had to know.

She opened her eyes. Tried to orientate herself in the darkness, reaching out her arms, shuffling forward on her knees with one hand against the floor for balance, the other stretched out in front of her. Before, in her panic to get away, she didn't think that she had got very far, so wherever – the body – was, she should have found it by now. She turned, in what she thought might be a right angle, and tried again. Her ragged breathing sounded far too loud, as did the _swish, swish, swish_ the fabric of her pant legs made against the floor.

Her hand nudged against cloth, and a solidness covered by the cloth. She froze, both needing to know and desperately not wanting to know, but in the end she was still a scientist, and the need to know won. She put out a hand which she could feel shaking. Swallowing, over and over again.

A pant leg. Heavy cloth. Shoes. Dress shoes, which felt shiny as her fingertips brushed against their leather. She reached out her other arm instead.

A shirt. Button down. Her fingers quested gently, brushing light as cobwebs. There was no tie. Another hesitant touch. The top button was undone, collar open.

The skin of the neck was cold. Cold and still. She touched her other hand instinctively to her own throat, felt the rapid beat of her pulse hammering against the walls of the artery.

Hair. Short.

The guess she had been suppressing grew in her, an idea, a suspicion. It ballooned, mushroom-like, filling her thoughts and her throat until her breathing halted and her muscles locked. Solidifying into a word, a single syllable. Pressing against her lips until she had to let it out, and although she had only enough breath for a whisper, it seemed to reverberate around her, sounding so loud, although she had only a breath for a whisper, and so final, so horribly final.

A name. Leaden with desperation.

"Mac?"


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Thank you very much to everyone reading, and especially to the ones leaving reviews and adding this to their favourites and alerts! And thank you for being patient with me too, I've been busy lately.**

**Thanks to lily moonlight for reading through, and poking me to update!**

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Mac leaned forwards over his desk, kneading his fists into his eyes. He had a headache that was getting worse as the day went on. It had begun sitting in a traffic queue right next to where a group of workmen were digging up a water main, where it could hardly have been any less painful if the pneumatic drill had been boring directly into his skull, instead of the paving slabs, and even Flack, who had been in the car with him, hadn't felt like making a joke about it.

Caffeine probably wasn't helping either, he thought, but he still gulped down the cold dregs from the coffee cup resting on the edge of his desk. Stella would roll her eyes if she saw him right now, and then probably leave his office abruptly, reappearing a few minutes later with a glass of water and a couple of painkillers, and a firm injunction to "just take the damn things", which he would have obeyed with a wry smile.

Today, though, was her day off.

He opened the next card file on his desk, a case solved earlier in the week, and began to go through it. The paperwork still towered mountainously before him, but he was steadily eroding it, working down through the dated layers. Years of practice had made this an almost automatic task at times, and he became absorbed in it, his aching head just another thing to store away at the back of his mind, along with the fact that he had a meeting with Sinclair the next day to discuss budgets, and that the sky outside his window was uniformly grey, the colour cardboard turned when it was left for days in alleyways.

His pen hovered over the next blank field, and he wrote that the body of the victim had been recovered from beneath a pile of cardboard boxes. The garbage collectors had found him. Mac remembered the red stain on the inner layers, diluted and diffused by the previous night's rain, a sunset seen through a cloud-bank.

He moved on to yesterday's case, the one that he had worked with Stella. One solved almost before it had been opened. Grey drizzle, and a red stain on the wet paving slabs, but no body. A rare case, but only too welcome. The final gaps completed that morning, when he and Flack had interviewed the victim, the woman now on the path to recovery, and passing on thanks to the man who had saved her. He filled the forms in steadily, leaving gaps for Stella to sign, and snatched occasional glances at the clock, the hands gliding round at their own pace, counting off numbers, counting away the time.

Time to leave. He stood up, lifting his jacket from where it had been draped over his chair back, and shuffled the piles of paperwork into alignment, replacing the lid on the pen he had been using as he dropped it into its pot. He cast a long, indecisive glance at the empty coffee cup standing neatly at the corner, and in the end left it where it was. He could deal with that tomorrow. On a whim, he picked up the case file that he had just been working on. He could drop it round at Stella's, use it as a pretext to see if she was busy or if she felt like going out for a meal. Lately he hadn't seen her as much outside work as he would have liked to. No one's fault, but he missed her company.

The door silently swung closed behind him as he left.

Fall had blown in suddenly during the last week, a warm Indian Summer quickly replaced with low, sullen skies and squalls of wind which assaulted Mac as he stepped out of the cab in front of Stella's building. Her third in as many years.

Distractedly, he paid the cab driver. The skies were heavy, forecasting more rain soon to come, and pedestrians were walking quickly, anxious to be getting home. They hurried along, not looking around, not paying him any notice. He sidestepped out of the path of a crying toddler being pushed in a buggy, and was gusted towards his destination.

Dead leaves had blown onto the front steps, and had begun to decay, leaving a layer of deceptively camouflaged slime. Buffeted by a treacherous twist of air he slipped, grabbed for the handrail, but managed at the last second to regain his balance before he fell. He reached the entrance safely, debating whether to ring Stella from his cell and warn her that he was coming.

All the way up in the elevator he was trying to think of what to say to her, feeling that he would owe her an apology for disturbing her with work on her day off, and wondering whether, after all, it was presumptuous of him to assume that she would be free to go out for dinner. She made him uncharacteristically uncertain, even when she wasn't there in person. So often, there was a sense of unreality which seemed to surround his dealings with her, the one thing in his ordered life which was outside his control. He glanced at the walls in her hallway, but they gave nothing to help him.

There was a button on the floor outside Stella's door.

He noticed. Out of habit. He bent and picked it up. Just an ordinary, rather large black button with black thread trailing from it, resting partly upright against the wood of the doorframe. It looked – and a frown wrote itself onto his face as he analysed it – it looked as if it had been ripped off as someone squeezed or shoved their way inside. It wasn't from Stella's coat.

Common sense told him that he was being paranoid, but instinct, honed from police work, whispered something else. That he needed to take notice of the single plain fact of its existence. _It wasn't Stella's._ But it could be from anyone. She could have received a delivery, and it could have been ripped from the coat of the delivery man as he carried it in. She could have bought a new coat, that he hadn't seen.

There could be any number of ordinary reasons to account for its presence.

He knocked on the door.

There was no answer, and he knocked again, firmly. Then once more, not a hello-are-you-in sort of knock, but a please-open-this-door-right-now one.

"Stella?" he called. He knew that there was no particular reason why she should be at home right now, but the button, and what it could possibly suggest, and the fact that he hadn't heard from her all day, were conspiring to make him feel uneasy. He pulled his bunch of keys from his pocket, selected the one to her door. If he was worrying about nothing he could apologise later. She would find it funny. He pictured her rolling her eyes and sighing despairingly, but trying to keep from laughing at the same time.

The key turned, and the lock gave a resonant click. He pulled out the key.

The door opened inwards before he had time to reach the handle.

A man he had never seen before stood just inside, staring at him suspiciously. His hair was the dark brown of decaying wood above his just-too-pale, expansive face, and there was a cruel twist to his mouth. Most of his weight seemed to be supported on his right leg. "Yes?" he asked.

"Who are you?" Mac asked bluntly.

The man frowned at him. Blank puzzlement. "I'm Stella's boyfriend. Who are _you_?"

"Her work partner. I didn't know that she had a boyfriend." He was on the defensive, wary.

"Oh? Well, I guess she didn't tell you then, Mr…?"

"Detective Taylor. Where is she?" He was aware that his tone was aggressive, but didn't really care.

The man was managing to lounge slightly, a pale hand braced casually against the wall, comfortable in his surroundings. More comfortable than Mac currently was, and he knew it. His face had changed emotion instantly, as if he had swapped a mask. From puzzlement to open friendliness. "She's in the shower right now." The water was running in the background. It must have been all the time, although he hadn't noticed it. "Do you want to come in, wait for her? I'll tell her that you're here."

Feeling like a fool for banging on the door, but still with worry biting at him, Mac stepped inside and closed the door behind him as the man moved down the entrance hall, limping slightly with his left leg, disappearing in the direction of the bathroom. He found that his free hand was unconsciously clenched into a fist, the edge of the card folder digging into the other. He hadn't considered that Stella might have a boyfriend. He felt hurt, and then felt ashamed of the feeling, but he had always assumed that she would tell him if she started dating again. And this man was not the sort of person that he would have expected her to pick.

The man was back, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "She says she'll be right out. You aren't on a parking meter, are you? She'll probably be a while. You know, women, right?" He winked conspiratorially, but awkwardly, the gesture failing to suit him.

Mac forced a polite smile onto his face. He couldn't hold it for more than a second. "No, I took a cab." He echoed the man's words back. "Mr…?"

"Sean." He seemed to be daring Mac to ask for a surname, still righteously patient in the face of questioning. The effect on Mac was to make him feel like an intruder, and from the slight smile on Sean's face, he was sure that it was deliberate. And the same thoughts were running through his head. _I don't trust this man. Do I believe that Stella does?_

He took a couple of steps towards the open kitchen door, not really sure why, perhaps from some subconscious desire to show that he belonged here and knew his way around, but stopped short. Because peeking out from beneath a small rug that he was sure usually resided in Stella's bedroom, was a dark stain. He'd been around it far too often not to recognise it instantly.

Blood.

Stella's words from months ago, words he should have recalled immediately, tolled in his ears. _No men in my place._ Stella would _never _bend those rules for a man like this.

He turned sharply. Back towards Sean.

Not quickly enough. Sean was already moving towards him, hands out of his pockets, a hypodermic needle glinting in one of them. Mac tried to move but he was too late – Sean's forearm connected with his head, slamming it against the wall. An explosion of pain and his legs buckled, and a sharp stabbing pain in his neck, and he fought to keep his eyes open, but they were unfocused and the world slid erratically, shapes bleeding into one another, spinning dizzily, and he thought _Stella_ –

And then –

There was nothing.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: Thank you very much for all your reviews! I love getting them, and please do feel free to add to them :) Thank you too to everyone putting this story on alerts or favourites.**

**Thanks to lily moonlight for the read-through.**

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Stella waited, a statue, holding her breath. For what, she had no idea. Anything. For someone to rescue her, maybe. For the man to sit up, and relieve her of the responsibility of choosing her actions. But nothing happened. Not that she expected it to. Anything that happened would be up to her.

She let the breath out slowly, eyes closed. The man lying in front of her was unquestionably dead. She had touched his _eye_, and she repressed a shudder at the thought of it, still repressing a scream of horror which was cloying in her throat. She worked with dead people. It was what she did every day. She had touched bodies. Had stood by in autopsy while they were violated by stainless steel blades, their last secrets wrenched from them, their lives excavated before her. But then, she had been protected by the latex barrier of her gloves, the impersonality of a white lab coat, separating herself from the coldness of their skin, the _reality_ of them, and the people that they had been.

But not here. Not now.

She could crawl away again, back into the formless dark, and hide. Hide from the knowledge of what was in front of her, cling to frail guesses and disintegrating hopes. She wanted to deceive herself that that was the only thing she could do, that in this blackness there was no way that she could tell for sure who this man was. But her mind was too fast for her, had already made connections, had already provided her with a way.

A way to validate a theory. No more than what she had been trained to do.

Her breaths were coming faster. She could feel her hands shaking.

Her eyelids were scrunched up tightly, and a mantra repeated in her head, driving out all her attempts at reasoning to herself. _Please don't be Mac please don't be Mac please don't be Mac please don't be please don't be don't be don't be don't be Mac please no…_

She reached out her hands. It felt harder than anything else she'd ever had to do.

Still with her eyes closed, still telling herself that there was some mistake, that this wasn't really happening, she felt for the shirt. Followed the line of buttons up to his neck, stopped at the one which was already undone. Undid the second button, and the third. He was wearing a t-shirt underneath.

She slid her hand under the collar of it, feeling the cold skin, gasping at the contact, dread or revulsion, she couldn't tell. It was like ice. Leaching heat from her. She spread her fingers on his chest, on his left side. Where she should have felt the heart pulsing beneath her palm.

The skin was smooth. No scar.

Not Mac.

- - - - -

She took her hand away from him, not too fast. Put it down on the floor, to support her, before leaning forwards and take great hungry gasps of air, letting them out, her whole body shuddering with released tension. _Not Mac. Not Mac._ Right now, that was all that mattered.

_Not Mac_. Mac would be looking for her. He would find her soon. Of course he would.

She sat up, her hand accidentally knocking against the man's leg. A soft noise as something moved. She reached out, for the moment unafraid, felt for the trouser pocket, and found a card box. Anticipation flared within her. It could be something useful. She felt for an opening, found none, felt for a corner. Tore it, heard the card fibres rip apart. She upended it slowly over one hand, and the contents slid out a little way. Cigarettes.

Mac didn't smoke, her thoughts reminded her, still engrained with the memory of the cold, smooth skin against her fingers. She needn't have touched him at all.

She left the box on the floor.

- - - - -

She was sitting against a wall. There were limits to this place, after all. She tried to think how she'd got there, remembered scooting herself backwards, quite calmly, breathing slowly, steadily. In. Out. In. Out. Putting a distance of both space and of time between her and the dead man.

The wall was bare concrete, just like the floor, uncomfortable against her back. And cold. Her arms were wrapped round her knees, bent legs pressed up close to the rest of her body. And it was still absolutely black. If there had been any light at all, her eyes would have caught it by now.

Things were different in this dark. Less real. She kept thinking that she heard noises; soft, furtive noises. Even her mind was conspiring against her.

She took a breath. "Hello?" Her voice sounded strange. Unsteadier than usual, slightly higher in pitch. The darkness didn't seem to like it. She could feel it in her throat, smothering her.

She tried again. For something less useless. "Help." In her ears it sounded stupid, flat, pointless. "Is there anyone there?"

The hostile silence was her only answer. It surged back quickly, forcing the sounds into submission.

A long time ago, she had been terrified of the dark. The terror had been a passing phase, triggered by an older roommate with a penchant for horror stories, but she'd always been uneasy, before and after. What had she done then? Memories unlocked themselves to her, memories of curling up beneath the bedcovers and singing songs under her breath, nursery rhymes mostly, taking comfort in their familiarity.

She didn't try it now. The falseness of her voice would be worse than the silence.

She closed her eyes. Wanting to wake up, and find that all of this was a nightmare. And then suddenly something seemed to clear inside her, a piece of reasoning clicking into place. She was a CSI. She was Mac's _best_ CSI. And she wasn't going to wait, curled into a corner, to be rescued, like some damsel in distress. She was going to get out herself.

Mac would expect nothing less.

So she opened her eyes, and put one hand against the roughness of the wall, and stood up. It worked this time – with a support, there was no lurching sensation that the whole world was off balance. She took a tentative step forwards, sliding her hand along, bracing herself with it. She walked slowly, concentrating on the feeling of the concrete beneath her hand, ready for when it would change to the smooth surface of a door. A door that, maybe, there would be some way of opening. After a while her foot, out in front of her, hit another wall, and she turned at the corner, and continued.

There were still noises. The soft brushing of her feet against the floor. Belatedly, she realised that she was wearing sneakers, with rubber soles. She couldn't remember why she was wearing them, and not her usual heels, but she was glad of it. Practical. She was wearing jeans, too. She didn't often wear them to work.

The second wall was featureless. It seemed to go on forever, with no change. Rough concrete. The palm of her hand stung from its scraping caress.

The third wall was no different, but she knew inside herself that she was getting close to her goal. With rising excitement, she followed it, wishing that she dared to walk faster. On, and on. She turned her hand, so that it was the back of it that ran along the concrete, but the skin was thinner there, so it was more painful to be scraped along the concrete, and soon she turned it back to her already smarting palm. Still waiting to find the door.

A corner. Fourth wall. Each one had seemed to be longer than the one before, and this one was truly endless. Her steps were small. She didn't want to trip. But they were becoming faster. She was bracing herself against disappointment, but knew that it was only a veneer laid over the hope bubbling inside her, that the door she would eventually come to would have a handle, would be unlocked. That this whole nightmare was just some bizarre test to see how long it took her to get out.

She hit the last corner, and almost gave a laugh of surprise. So the door she had been feeling for had been near her starting point? If only she had taken the other direction, she would have found it almost immediately.

She strode on, her breaths coming faster.

The soft thud of her steps quickening.

She hit a corner.

For a moment, the surprise overwhelmed all her other thoughts, and all she thought, stupidly, was, _What?_

Had she missed it? Miscounted? _No. I couldn't have._ But she must have.

She began to walk again, quickly, stumbling along. Wall. Corner. Wall. Corner. Wall. Corner. Wall. Corner. Wall. Her pace increasing, fear overtaking common sense, faster and faster, and then she stumbled again and fell forward, skidding along the floor on her knees, feeling and hearing the denim of her jeans rip, feeling her skin grate. She put her hands flat down in front of her, and dropped her head, and shut her eyes, breathing heavily. _There's no way out._

No way out.

It crashed over her; she was drowning under it. No way out.

She pushed herself to her feet, shouldered the wall as if she expected it to move. Slapped it with the flat of her palms, again, again. "Let me out!" she screamed. "What the _fuck_ is going on? Let me out! LET ME OUT!" She made a fist, pounded the wall, slammed her forearm against it, feeling the darkness shrink and constrict around her, walls drawing in on her, suffocating her, not thinking about any logic, just the instinctive fear of a cage, and the need to be free of it. "Let me out! Let me OUT, goddamn you!"

Her body stopped her before her mind did, as the pain and exhaustion rose up in her, and she stopped, her hands pressed against the wall, and breathed, eyes closed. She turned around and slid slowly downwards to the floor, bringing her legs up, wrapping her arms around her knees, tipping her head backwards until it knocked against the support she leant against. A rush of warmth in her eyes, and she couldn't stop the tears which leaked out and down her cheeks, feeling their advance over her skin, but she didn't wipe them away. They rolled down her face, clinging to her jaw line, and then dropping soundlessly to land on the exposed skin at the base of her neck, and absorbing into the fabric of her shirt. One tear lodged in the corner of her mouth, and she licked it away, tasting the familiar saltiness, savouring the liquid. Her mouth was dry.

And she was tired. Her mind felt leaden. She brought her head down onto her knees, curled into herself. And allowed herself to doze, passing seamlessly into sleep.

- - - - -

She woke. Eyes snapping open. Instantly on alert. She had been woken. _Something_ had woken her.

Tensed, she strained her ears, strained her eyes pointlessly.

Nothing.

_You imagined it, that's all. Just your imagination. _She silently unclasped her hands, slid her body round onto her knees. She swallowed, and the parched lining of her throat stuck together and then parted painfully.

Still nothing.

She let out a long breath.

From somewhere in the middle of the room were a couple of muffled thumps, scuffles.

Instantly, she froze. _There's something there_. Her nightmarish constructs returned full force, rats with long, sharp teeth, enormous spiders, nameless things with claws. She held her breath, waiting, her mouth dry, sandpaper rasping her throat each time she swallowed.

No more noise.

_You're a CSI!_ her thoughts shrieked. _A grown woman, and you're afraid of the dark?_ No. She wasn't going to sit huddled in a corner. Mac would expect more of her. As quietly as she could, she began to creep towards where it had come from, still on hands and knees.

Her hand hit something, something smooth, which slid forwards slightly. She tensed, and felt for it.

Plastic. She picked it up, hearing it crackle slightly. The prism shape of a packaged sandwich. Next to it, a plastic bottle, heavy with liquid. Liquid. She was _so_ thirsty.

The cap came off with a snake-hiss of releasing pressure, making her jerk involuntarily. She took a small sip. The chemical taste of coke. She would have preferred water, but this was liquid, and she gulped down as much as she could swallow at once, the same temperature as the surroundings but still deliciously cool, before replacing the cap. She didn't know how long it might have to last her for.

Then she picked up the bottle and sandwich packet in one hand, and began to crawl forwards again, feeling out. Searching for where the man's body was. She had to know.

She couldn't find him.

Her hand came down on something, which squashed slightly. She put down the items she was holding, picked it up, explored it with her fingers. She recognised it.

A pack of cigarettes. With the top of it torn away and hanging by a narrow strip of card. The tear that she had made.

Whoever the dead man was, he was no longer there.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: Ok, I owe all of you a serious apology - it's been a horrendously long time since I last updated. I started at university, and I've had hardly a second to call my own since then! Because of this, I've fallen extremely far behind with reviews, review replies, and so on. I'm really sorry about this, and I'm currently doing my best to catch up with them all, as such I can't say for cetain when the next chapter'll be up, but as soon as possible, hopefully quicker than this one! This chapter's longer than previous ones, I hope that that goes some way towards making it up...  
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**Thank you very much to everyone who's reviewed this story, I _really_ appreciate it, and to everyone who's added it to alerts/favourites too, please do continue, I've only just got back into writing, so I'm nervous as to how this one's turned out! Thanks too to _iluvcsi4ever_ for discussion, and to _lily moonlight_ for reading through and making suggestions, and also for poking me with (much deserved) update forks!**

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There was shock first. Someone had been next to her. Someone had taken the body away.

Then she wondered, _How?_ She hadn't found a door. For a moment doubt registered in her mind but no, she _couldn't_ have missed one.

And then there was fury, and it was the fury which remained, scorching away her fear. Because someone had been there, and had left her behind. Probably no coincidence that the body had been removed as soon as she had worked out who it _wasn't_.

This whole thing was for her benefit. She had been captured, and imprisoned down here, and someone was playing with her – leaving a corpse for her to find, dropping supplies when it suited them. Waiting for her to break.

Well, she wasn't going to give in that easily. She fanned the flame of anger inside her, her determination rising. She _was_ going to get herself out.

But first, she was going to eat. She had no idea how long it had been since her last meal, and hunger was gnawing at her insides. No idea how long it would be until her next meal, either, but after a moment's deliberation she felt for the sandwich packet and ripped it open. Two triangular sandwiches, and she ate one. The filling was cheap and tasteless, possibly some sort of plastic-resembling cheese, and she saved the other, doubting that it would get much worse by being exposed to the air.

With the bottle and packet in one hand she stood up, cautiously. She couldn't crawl everywhere. She shouldn't _have _to crawl on her hands and knees, cowed by fear. Her free arm out in front of her, she took small, slow steps, heading in what felt like a straight line, although of course she couldn't be sure. Under her breath, she counted them, pacing them evenly.

The wall was twelve steps away. With her hand against it, she followed it to the nearest corner, and left her supplies there, where she could find them again. All the time thinking. There must be a trapdoor, in the ceiling. Someone had dropped down the bottle and sandwich to her. Probably in the centre of the room.

She paced to the next corner, the same small steps. It took thirty-two. She thought about it, estimated it as about ten meters. The next side was the same length. She turned, walked back sixteen steps, hesitated, and left the safety of the wall to walk sixteen shaky steps outwards, on as straight a bearing as she could manage, into the centre.

Now what? Feeling self-conscious, she jumped, arms up above her head. They met no resistance. She landed with knees bent, arms outstretched for balance, and managed to stay upright. She took several steps forwards, tried again. Again, nothing. The ceiling was out of her reach.

_Did I really expect it to be that easy?_ she asked herself, knowing that against all logic she had hoped to be able to answer herself with a yes.

She took the same number of steps back, back to where she estimated the centre might be. She tipped her head back, straining her eyes for any light, anything at all.

Nothing.

She sat down, with her legs crossed. To remove the body, whoever it was must have lowered down some sort of ladder. It might happen again, and she would be waiting.

**- - - - -**

The rain woke him. A fine film of water on his face. Cold.

He cracked his eyes open. The world a narrow slit of grey. Blurs. Patches of light and shade. A rhythmic beat pounding inside his head.

Grey fog smothering his thoughts.

He closed his eyes.

-

And opened them, fought them open. Looked up.

Grey, half covered by darker grey. He blinked slowly, trying to find a focus, but there was none. There was a hard floor beneath his head, beneath his back. He moved his hand, felt the skin rasp over roughness. Hit an edge.

Lifted his hand slightly, feeling with his fingers. A step. He blinked his eyelids again, forcing them to remain opened.

Sky. The lighter grey was sky.

Step. Sky. So the darker grey was a ceiling, a roof.

He had to get out, get into the sky. Even though nothing really made sense at all, because he had no idea where he was or how he had got there. He groped for a memory, and they disintegrated as he grasped for them, frail spider-silk threads tearing, leaving only a dissolving, broken web. Glass eyes of windows reflecting. Rain. Stella's face turning away from him. Paving slabs. Sheets and sheets of piling paper, words and letters blurring in his head.

He opened his eyes. Halfway. It was all he could manage.

He moved both his arms, found purchase with the heel of his hands. One splashed through a shallow pool of water. He pushed, tensing his arms until his elbows straightened and his body slid backwards, up, the hard edge of the step ramming into the small of his back. There was more clarity in his sight, the oblong of a fire-door in front of him. Featureless, with no way to open it. He blinked hard, trying to force focus into his eyes, made out the packed dirt piled around the sill. In his first moment of real lucidness, he realised that unless he moved, it could be a long time before he was found.

Up the steps. He braced his hands on the first rim, dragged himself upwards. The light grey slid across, filled more of his vision as he looked up. Droplets of the drizzle which had collected in the hollows around his eyelids rolled and trickled across his skin, down beneath his collar, and his head and back banged against the flight of steps.

Up again. In the cold grey mist that was his consciousness, he hardly remembered why he was fighting gravity and the urge to lie still and let his eyes fall closed. Just an instinctive need to get towards the sky, away from the dim dark where he had awoken, and a nameless, formless sense of urgency. Something was depending on him. Faces without the attachment of names ghosted through his head, blurring into each other. Moisture filmed his face, laid a second lens over his eyes.

And then, finally, after an eternity, he forced his upper body up and there was no support behind him, so that his head lolled back. One more push, and he twisted around, rolled onto flatness, grit and water against his cheek. His head pounded, almost overpowering his breathing, eyes full of dancing dark specks.

_Help. Call help._

A coherent thought at last wormed its way towards the surface of his mind, slaved his hands to obey without fully understanding it, seeking slowly through the pocket of his coat.

They were empty. No solid shape of his cell, which should have been there. Nothing.

He tried to roll over, tried to push with his arm to turn his body, but it didn't work. His eyes had closed without him noticing. He lay there, freezing, frozen, without the strength to shiver. His limbs ossified to stone.

Even the few fragmented thoughts he had managed to cling on to were dissolving …

**- - - - -**

She waited.

Time passed. She had no idea how much. No idea how long she had been unconscious, either time. It could have been hours.

It could have been much longer.

She lifted her watch to her ear, listened to its soft, regular ticking. Wished that it glowed in the dark, but any reminder that time was still running was better than nothing. Each tick bringing her closer to when she would be found. Or to when she worked out how to rescue herself from this place.

There must be a way.

Something touched her face, brushing softly across it.

She couldn't suppress a cry, one forearm immediately shielding herself, the other batting in front of her, trying to find whatever it was. It was gone.

Without realising, she had leapt to her feet, her eyes open, straining to see. She swung one arm in wide circles in front of her, breaths coming fast and shallow, heart pounding.

Nothing.

Nothing.

But she hadn't imagined it. She was sure of that. It had been real. Something in the dark.

She felt with both hands, fingers clutching at handfuls of blackness which slipped away.

Nothing.

Then – something.

She gasped, at the same time as her fist clenched around what had just gently stroked her arm.

Bringing her other hand to it, cautiously. String. She felt along its length, pulled it up to find what weighted it down. Found something and brought it up near her face, although of course that was futile. Her fingers explored the moulded plastic.

An oblong in the centre, eight longer, flexible projections.

A toy spider.

She let it go in disgust, and let her hand drift up the string, as high up as she could reach. Her other arm held out for balance as she strained up on her toes.

The string began to move up through her fingers. She instinctively tightened her hold on it, and tugged it. It stopped moving. A second went by, and then it tugged, once, upwards.

She pulled it twice, quick successive jerks.

It jerked in response. Once. Twice.

Someone was holding the other end of it.

The anger she had allowed to smoulder inside her suddenly condensed into a white-hot knot of fury, bright enough to burn its way through the darkness and fear in her mind. "Hey!" she shouted, hearing her voice echo from the bare walls. "You tell me what's going on, right now!"

No response.

She twisted her hand to wrap the string around it, and tugged it hard. It began to pull away upwards, smoothly but firmly. Her arm rose with it, until her body was keeping it anchored. The loops bit sharply into her wrist, but she didn't let it go.

"Let me out of here!" she shouted. "What the _fuck_ are you playing at? I don't care who you are, just let me out RIGHT NOW!"

Her arm was being pulled painfully, tension shaking through the string. The tension was forcing its way through her too, furious at the silent presence above her, connected to her. Her voice rose to a near scream. "Let me GO!"

The string snapped.

She stumbled with the released tension, her foot twisting beneath her, pitching her backwards, and she struggled for an eternally drawn-out second on the knife-blade of balance, but her weight tipped her back, back, and she felt herself powerlessly falling through blackness, threw her arm out uselessly behind her. It twisted as her weight landed on it, and she heard the _crack_, felt the jar as the bone snapped.

Her whole body and mind froze with numb shock, and for long, long moments she could do nothing more than lie perfectly still, a scream locked inside her lungs. Long moments before a part of her brain which seemed wholly separate from her managed to roll her over, off her arm, before the pain came.

It arrived in a flood, overwhelming her, suffocating her, drowning her. She managed a couple of swear words, gasped through tight-clenched teeth, aimed at her arm and herself and whoever was above her, and then the surrounding darkness poured into her and claimed her.

And there was nothing.

**- - - - -**

"Sir? Sir, can you hear me?"

_Yes…_

Cold. Ice cold. And so heavy. Unable to move. Even his eyes wouldn't open.

Someone was speaking. Unfamiliar. A woman. Too fast. He struggled to catch the flow of her words. They fell through his fog, barely coherent.

"…I don't know who he is, I was just walking past…no, he's not responding…"

_Yes I am… I can hear you…_

A hand rested on his shoulder, fingers squeezing it reassuringly. "Sir, I've called an ambulance, they'll be here soon… Hang on…"


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: Merry Christmas! I hope that everyone's having a great time. And, at long last, I have another chapter! Thanks to everyone who's reviewed and everyone who's added this story to alerts and favourites, please do continue, I really like to know what people think.**

**Thanks to **_**Autumngold**_** for reviewing last chapter and my other stories! Thanks also to **_**iluvcsi4ever**_** and **_**lily moonlight**_** for discussion and many pokes to update, and **_**lily**_** also for reading.**

**Also, I'm writing a collaberative story with _lily moonlight_ called "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that'll be posted on Boxing day, we'd love you to check it out! :D  
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"…Mac?"

Someone squeezed his hand, and he automatically returned it.

"Hey, Mac? Can you hear me?"

"Mmm," he managed, and opened his eyes.

Flack was filling most of his view, leaning forward in a chair, concern etched on his face. Behind him there was a bland whiteness. "How're you feeling?"

His head was pounding, and Flack's face wasn't quite in focus. He lay still, waiting for the situation to resolve into something he could make sense of. There was something important, something that he couldn't quite remember…

"You're at Angel Of Mercy, Mac. You were attacked."

Attacked. Been attacked.

He didn't remember it. _Couldn't _remember it. Everything was still fogged in pain, his pulse thudding deafeningly inside his head. And still the same half-formed thought, maybe a memory, fluttering weakly, spectral, dissolving as he grasped for it. Something he should know. Something that was _wrong_.

The dingy white began to resolve into a wall, a shiny floor.

Flack continued talking. His words projected like a shield in front of the worry written into lines around his mouth and eyes. "Whoever it was, they took your phone, but left your wallet and all your cash. A woman found you in an alleyway and phoned 911." He shifted position in the plastic chair. "You've got a pretty nasty concussion, you'll probably be in here for a few days yet. Don't argue."

An alleyway? It felt _wrong_ to him, that description. A contradiction somewhere, but one which he couldn't pin down. He found his voice finally. "I don't – " He began to shake his head but stopped immediately, regretting the decision. Flack winced in sympathy. "I don't remember."

"Ok, what's the last thing you _do_ remember?"

His memories ended blurrily. "I was – at the lab…" he began slowly. "I remember getting in a taxi…" He tried to think beyond that, tried to think where he had been getting a taxi to, but there was nothing. A void in his memories, an abyss opening up before him. Uncertainty.

He clung to the one tangible thing which rose easily to the surface of his thoughts. "Stella?" he asked, knowing that Flack would understand the rest of the question. If he had thought about it, he would have expected her to be there.

Flack shrugged slightly, leaning forwards. "She'll be here soon, I think." He picked up on Mac's questioning look. "I left her messages on her apartment phone and cell, she sent me a text about an hour ago to say that she's been out of town, and that the signal's too bad for a call, but she's heading back. This time of day, though, she'll be lucky to get anywhere in a hurry."

"What time is it?" Mac asked. Rush hour had only just been beginning, when he left the lab…

"Half past eight. In the morning," Flack added as an afterthought.

"Oh."

He closed his eyes. Lindsay's voice said, "But what are we going to tell him?"

_Lindsay?_ He opened his eyes with a start, and suddenly Flack had moved to be leaning against the opposite wall, devouring a sandwich with large, hasty bites, and Lindsay was standing next to him, turning her cell over and over in her hands. Danny was perched on the very edge of the chair, which had apparently walked to the foot of the bed.

Danny said, "Shush," rather sharply, and followed it up with an apologetic look to her. Mac rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, and the movement drew the faces of the others towards him. They were clear this time, as were his thoughts.

"How you doing?" Danny asked, grinning, but with noticeably less cheerfulness than usual.

"Better," Mac said. "How long was I asleep for?" He didn't miss the uneasy look that passed between Danny and Flack, or the way that Lindsay began twisting her cell faster, until it seemed certain that she was just about to drop it. A horrible suspicion began to grip him, shaped around the absence of the fifth person, who _wasn't_ in the room.

"Mac – " Danny began, and then stopped, glancing at the other two.

"Where's Stella?" Mac asked. His mind was immediately processing worst-case scenarios. An accident, on the way back into the city. She could be in the hospital too, perhaps badly injured…

Flack stepped forwards, body relaxed in a display of forced nonchalance. "We don't know exactly where she is. No one's been able to get in contact with her since she sent that text."

"How long ago was that?"

"About – four hours ago."

_Four hours._ Anything could have happened. _Anything_. He felt a sudden burst of anger. "Why aren't you out looking for her?" he demanded, pushing himself upright with his hands behind him on the mattress. The world lurched sickeningly, and he was only partly aware of hands easing him back down as he swallowed, fighting down the nausea which rose up in his throat.

"Go easy," Flack was saying calmly, his hand a firm presence on his shoulder. Mac closed his eyes and waited for the dizziness to subside, although the pain in his head was back in full force. "We can't leap to conclusions, Mac. We don't know if anything's wrong or not. We don't know where she was coming back from, and her cell phone's turned off. Do you know what she was doing yesterday?"

He lifted his head again, but managed to stop himself this time before he had begun to shake it. "No. She didn't say anything…"

Another look passed between the three of them, interrupted by the sudden beep of Danny's pager. He read it quickly, with an expression of irritation. "419. Got a dead body. Linds, mind if I take the car?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

He jogged out, the door swinging shut behind him, the sound of his footfalls quickly swallowed up in the corridor's bustle.

Mac let his head drop back against the pillow. He closed his eyes and willed a different set of footsteps to approach, and open the door, and walk in. But they didn't.

- - - - -

A low moan, weaving into half-dreams. Only belatedly realising that it was her own throat forming the sound.

She lay on her side, curled around the pain, trying to will herself to sink back into the deeper darkness of unknowingness which she was rising up from against her will. But the cold rough concrete against her cheek was anchoring her, tying her to the physical world, and she couldn't escape. The pain was tangible, a shell around her, preventing her from moving. An animal with long sharp teeth, gnawing at her arm.

Noise. Metal sliding across metal. Noises must have woken her.

A thud, a sharp sound. Metal striking concrete.

_Help,_ she thought. _Help me._ But all that escaped from her mouth was another indistinct moan. Useless.

A rhythmic noise, familiar. Step, step, step.

No hesitancy in the rhythm, so her brain told her there must be light, and she cracked her eyes open, but there was only darkness, darkness all around, and footsteps coming closer. She tried to move away, to hide, but couldn't.

Step, step, step, stop. Right beside her. As if the owner of the footsteps could see her clearly. As if it wasn't dark at all.

_He can see…_

And hands touching her, probing at her arm, and the beast lashed out at her, sinking its fangs deep through her flesh.

"_No…no…_"

She tried again to move, to squirm away into a hidden corner of the darkness, but a hand pressed her down and something pricked the soft flesh inside the elbow of her right arm, the uninjured one. A snake's fang. Threading venom through her veins. She could feel it invading her, not dulling the pain, but tearing loose her grip on her own body, pulling her away, dislocating her into the darkness.

Reality was slipping, disintegrating, and she was falling, falling through the floor and down, down, endlessly. And the beast was still attached to her arm, slithering around, its pelt encircling, and something pressed around the back of her neck. She moaned again, weakly, but she was still falling, spinning, her eyes pressed shut.

_He can see…_

Step, step, step. The sounds retreating. Fading.

And gone.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: Yes, I actually have a new chapter! This story has not been abandoned! I sincerely apologise for the ridiculously long wait and hope that you'll forgive me for it... I had an incredibly busy term at uni and had to give up reading and writing fanfic completely for the duration of it.**

**Thank you very much to everyone who's put this story on alerts and favouites, and especially to everyone who's reviewed. Also apologies to the couple of you who have only just received a reply. I think I've sent one to everyone now, though... apart from _Lonnie_ and _autumngold_ who I couldn't send one to, thank you very much for them. I'd love hearing feedback, so please, please do continue!  
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**Thanks to _lily moonlight_ for reading, and for everyone who's been poking me to update, particularly _lily moonlight, iluvcsi4ever, _and _marialisa_! I have bruises!**

**Oh, one language warning for this.  
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There was no pain, or cold. The hardness of the concrete beneath her had been replaced with something else, something that had no particular texture or temperature. No particular location.

She couldn't move. Not even to curl her fingers, although her eyelids still responded to her commands. She accepted it unquestioningly. No reason to move. Nowhere for her to move to. She was adrift in an abyss. Alone.

Adrift…

Drifting alone through utter darkness. The blackness of ocean depths, of burial mounds beneath fathoms of earth. Her half-open eyes gazed unblinking into a void.

Then, without warning, there was a light.

A faint glow began to expand from a dim orange seed. Coiling outwards, upwards, filling in edges around a silhouette. A figure was standing facing her, hands in pockets, in a familiar stance. Around him, between his motionless form and hers, was nothing.

The ember-light illuminated nothing but him. It reached no walls, and was absorbed into blackness at the level of his feet. She could barely pick out the features of his face. But she had known from the first moment of faint vision exactly who he was.

"Mac," she whispered. "Mac, help me."

She tried to stretch out her hand towards him. She couldn't move.

He tilted his head slightly to the side, measuring her up.

"Please," she whispered again. Whimpered. "Mac..."

He took a step towards her, and stopped. "Why should I help you?" he asked. His tone was conversational. "Really, Stella, I expected more. You let yourself be kidnapped and dragged down here? I would have thought you'd have at least put up a better fight. You've let me down, you know."

She strained against whatever was pressing her down, but she couldn't move a single muscle. "I'm sorry - I'll do better next time - "

Mac shrugged dismissively. "What do you need me for, anyway?"

"I can't move," she moaned. Her voice was weak, and she hated it. "Help me. Please."

He sighed deeply. "Honestly, Stella," he said, voice heavy with disappointment. "Don't you know anything? Nothing's holding you down. No one's keeping you here. You're weak, that's all." His tone was stern, cold, detached. The one he used on criminals. Those not worthy of his time. There was no pity in his eyes as they swept over her. "A stronger person would be able to get up now and walk out, not just lie on the floor begging for someone to come and save them. If I'd known you were this weak, I wouldn't have made you my second-in-command."

"No," she protested, straining desperately against her invisible bonds, as panic began to flood her mind. "It's not my fault, I can't move, I can't!"

The light illuminating him was fading, dying, and the blackness began to creep back around his form, reclaiming the territory it had been forced from. He lifted one hand in a little wave. A farewell gesture. "I'll be seeing you. Well, if you're strong enough to get yourself out, that is. If not, I really don't care what happens to you."

"No!" she screamed frantically, struggling to move, to get to him, but still immobile. "No! Don't leave me! Mac, please, please don't leave me here!"

The darkness shrouded him, the light gone altogether. His voice remained for a few seconds, fading fast. "So long, Stell. It was nice to know you..."

"Mac!"

He was gone.

-

She jerked awake, gasping for breath, the concrete icy against her boiling skin, sticky with a sheen of sweat. She turned towards the memory of the light, tendrils of her hair plastered damply to her forehead.

There was nothing.

She was burning. It emanated from her left arm, where a core of molten metal had replaced the bone, searing through her flesh, a furnace feeding on the layers of muscle and skin above, radiating liquid fire through her veins.

"Mac," she moaned. Her lips cracked as she forced his name through her parched throat. He wouldn't leave her, surely… But he had said that she had failed him. That he wouldn't be coming back for her.

_No. That wasn't real._

She wrested her memory backwards. Footsteps and dim light and the sound of metal sliding over metal and the stab of something and Mac and footsteps… They wouldn't detangle from each other, wouldn't separate out into real and unreal. Everything was dulled by the pain, clouded into confusion.

Slowly, she became aware of an unfamiliar pressure around the back of her neck. She reached up her hand, fingers gently probing, and found cloth. Following it, it became a sling, supporting her other arm.

So that had been real. The footsteps leading towards her, and then away again. Mac? _No. He wouldn't have left me._ And then, tolling in her head, was the remembrance of the realisation that the footsteps had not hesitated. The owner of them had been in no doubt about exactly where she was.

The implication was horrifying, dizzying. _She_ should also be able to see, but couldn't.

_No. Not that. I _can't_ be blind…_

_There has to be another explanation._

She couldn't find one. _You're not thinking straight._

But thinking straight was impossible. Thinking past the all-encompassing agony was impossible. She tried to slow her rapidly increasing rate of breathing, forcibly swallowing down the panic rising up through her. The membranes of her furnace-seared throat stuck and pulled apart, just one more source of pain. And reminding her of her thirst, the urge for water becoming overpowering. Memory began to taunt her, the memory of the half-drunk bottle of coke in the corner, an unreachable distance away now that every movement was a jolt of agony.

Better than staying here. Better than succumbing to her thoughts, which were fast becoming blacker than her surroundings. But the distance she had to cross…

She pictured crawling across the floor, useless arm swinging and juddering in the sling, every foot of ground gained paid for by fire spasming through her nerves. No. She couldn't do that. Walking would be easier. She could hold her arm still, as much as was possible. But equally, if she walked, she could fall. And that would be even worse. Falling was something she couldn't even bring herself to imagine. But it was only a _could_ fall…

She went with the _could_ and stood up, slowly. Her face twisted as her arm moved, and she gasped for breath, but she didn't call out. If someone was nearby, her captor, she wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of hearing her scream in pain. That was probably what they wanted. For the first time, she was grateful for the dark, because at least it stopped them _seeing_ her.

Unless…

_NO._

_Don't think of that… don't think of that…_

Surely she had taken more steps than should have been possible. The walls were moving away from her, the room swelling in size, engorging with the black that was almost solid. It was an eternity to the nearest wall, an eternity measured in breaths of air that hardly filled her lungs, measured in broken bones knocking against her chest, in hesitant footsteps unsure if they would find a solid surface to land on, but she made it at last, and leaned against it, her forehead pressed against the icy roughness of it, trying to cool the heat burning through her body.

Then she followed its line, not knowing which direction would bring her most quickly to where she had left the water, and not really caring. Her fingertips caught against the sandpaper texture, but any sensation it caused was inconsequential. She kept on going. If she stopped, she didn't know if she would be able to start again.

Her outstretched right hand felt the corner at the same time that her foot kicked something, which skidded on the floor, the unmistakable noise of plastic scraping concrete. The bottle. Still using the wall as a guide, she dropped down, until she was kneeling, and felt around for it.

It was lighter than she remembered. Than it should be. She shook it, and there was no answering gurgle of liquid.

Empty.

But she hadn't finished it… she had saved half of it from later! Suddenly desperate, she pinned it between her knees, twisting off the cap one-handed, and raised it to her mouth. A couple of drops of liquid slid out, barely enough to moisten her tongue, or to taste the sweetness in them. And that was it. She dropped it, and felt about for the sandwich.

It wasn't there.

Now that there was nothing to eat, her stomach began to growl as she thought about the lack of food. _I should have eaten it while I had the chance,_ she thought, irritably, but her rationality was working against her, and pointed out that she hadn't known it would be taken away, and it would probably have been more stupid to eat it all at the time. But rationality wasn't helping her now.

"Fuck you," she snarled viciously into the dark. "Why the hell are you doing this?"

Of course, there was no answer.

"Why're you doing this?" she asked the darkness again, but now she could hear her voice sliding upwards, beginning to break. She tried to control it. "Who _are_ you? What do you _want_?"

She wasn't really expecting a reply anymore.

Tears were pressing against her eyelids, and she squeezed them shut. She wanted to curl up on the floor and cry, and cry. She wanted the sun. She wanted to be out. _Out_. Tears, precious liquid that she couldn't afford to lose, were trickling their way out of ducts, running saltily down her cheeks. She blinked, and swiped them away with her right hand, and then strained her eyes again. She couldn't see anything.

She closed her eyes. She couldn't see anything. _Anything_ could be nearby. She had filled the blackness before with nightmare creatures, but it could be anywhere she wanted it to be. She felt sick with pain and hunger and thirst, and un-anchored from reality. Not that reality had been particularly strong, anyway. She was drifting. She could be _anywhere_.

So. Anywhere. Anywhere that was quite cold, with a hard floor and walls.

She pictured the morgue.

She was sitting on the floor, leaning against the adjoining wall to the one lined with metal locker-doors. The lights were switched on, and the surfaces gleamed. No shadows.

Sid walked out of his office, wearing his blue scrubs, glasses dangling from their string around his neck. "Stella!" he exclaimed. "How nice to see you here!"

She smiled. _And you. I haven't talked to you properly for a while. What have you been up to lately?_

"Well, my oldest daughter came home last weekend. She's away at college, you know, and I don't get to see her often enough. It's sad, when they grow up and fly the nest. We had a lovely walk around the park. I'll have to show you the photographs sometime."

_I'd like that._

"But I presume that was just small talk, leading up to the discussion of a case? After all, why else would you be down here?"

_You know me too well. But I always enjoy your company, I assure you._

"Thank you for the compliment, my dear." He gave a half-bow in her direction, and then scratched his head. "We're having a bit of a slow period today, to tell you the truth. But I _can_ show you something very interesting." He gestured, a come-over-here motion with his hand, towards the end of the wall of lockers.

She shook her head, ashamed of her own weakness. _Sorry, Sid. I don't think I can walk right now._ For some reason, she felt tears well again in her eyes, but this time they didn't spill traitorously from under her lids.

He crouched down in front of her. "You'll be fine, Stella. I know you will be." His eyes were kind, and his voice was soft.

_Thank you._

"You're very welcome. Just hold on, now. I know you can."

He got up and walked away, the walls fading as he went. _Come back,_ she tried to call, _Please don't leave me on my own,_ but he didn't look round.


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: In penance for the enourmous amount of time since my last update, this chapter is longer than others have been, and also begins to contain some answers... **

**Thank you to _lily moonlight_ for discussion and reading, this chapter is also dedicated to her as a birthday present. Thanks also to everyone who's reviewed, added this to their alerts and favourites lists, and to everyone who's been poking me, subtly or otherwise, for an update!  
**

* * *

Danny jammed the SUV haphazardly against the kerb, in a 'No Parking' section of the street. Hawkes, once he had recovered from the sudden jerk forward, broken sharply by the seat belt, almost called out to warn him that a traffic warden was approaching, but then saw the look on his face and decided against it.

"Sir, you can't park there – " the warden, a young woman, called sharply, a frown on her face, but Danny glowered at her and held up his badge. She hesitated, and then moved on, giving both him and the vehicle a wide berth.

"Why weren't you at the hospital?" Danny asked accusingly as they retrieved their kits from the trunk.

Hawkes sighed. "I'm on shift. I was busy at the lab, and I _couldn't_ leave." Frustration was evident in Danny's every tense movement, and he wasn't about to take it personally. The anger was at the whole situation. He could feel the same anger smouldering in his chest, but restrained it, choosing to maintain outward calm. "How's Mac?"

"Worried sick about Stell. Not so concerned about himself, which is just typical, but he's not lookin' so great. He doesn't know what happened, so no one else does either." Danny jerked his head, as if trying to shake away unwanted thoughts. "I hope this is quick.."

"We don't know that anything's happened to Stella," Hawkes pointed out. "We could all just be jumping to conclusions.

"Yeah? Since when have you known her completely drop off the radar like this? She knows about Mac, and she's not here. That's reason enough for worry, or haven't you noticed?"

"Danny, calm down."

Danny briefly closed his eyes, and ran his free hand through his hair. "Sorry, man."

"No worries," Hawkes told him. "You got the info on this case from Angell?"

"Nah, she said you'd fill me in." Clearly, he'd been too busy brooding to remember to ask for the information on the ride over.

"It's a dump job." Hawkes said as he led the way across the paved square, to a line of artificially placed flowerbeds attempting unsuccessfully to mask the delivery entrance to a large fast food outlet, describing the general outline of the case as he did so. He also hoped that this case would not take long, although he felt a stirring of guilt at the thought, and didn't vocalise it. Every victim should get the same attention, he knew, every life which passed through their work hours treated equally, but at the same time he also knew that he was wishing fervently that he could be doing something else, something that would help them find where Stella was. He wondered how long it would be before they made their worry official, rather than just something which lurked in shadows in the corners of all their minds, playing on their fears.

Danny had overtaken him as soon as he'd stopped talking, and was already crouching by the middle-aged man who lay prone on the damp earth, yellowing stems of last season's dead flowers crushed beneath him. His blue button-down shirt was stained with dirt. Angell was standing nearby, her face empty of her usual blend of humour and sarcasm. She, too, was wishing that she was elsewhere, on the other case which wasn't a case, which no one was mentioning. "No ID," she said bluntly, aiming her words at Danny. Hawkes already knew, of course. "He's got a cell phone in his pocket, switched off."

There were no signs of a struggle, and no other imprints surrounded him in the dirt.

"We know what killed him?" Danny asked.

"No obvious injury," Hawkes told him. "There's what appears to be an injection site on his neck, so possibly he was poisoned, or OD'd, and it must have happened elsewhere and his body carried or dragged here. But – "

"Let me guess," Danny interrupted dryly. "No one saw anything."

Angell shrugged, her expression and tone flat. "What, in this city? You're looking for a miracle, Messer."

-

"I'm not staying here," Mac stated firmly.

"Mac, don't be ridiculous," Flack said. "You're in no condition to leave just yet. You need to listen to Doctor – "

"Philips," supplied the man in the white coat, for the third time, his glasses slightly askew on his thin nose which, coupled with his ruffled brown hair, gave him a general air of studiousness. At the moment, though, his expression was one of frustration at the stubbornness of his patient.

"Yeah, just listen to Doc Philips here. _He _says you need to stay in bed."

"I'm discharging myself. Refusing medical treatment." His eyes dared the other men to try and stop him.

Dr Philips groaned. "Look, you know that I can't stop you, but I _must_ recommend – "

Mac's head was pounding, and he would have liked nothing more than to close his eyes and sleep, but he knew that he couldn't. He needed to get up and get back to the lab. _Stella_ needed him to, whether or not anyone would yet admit that she was in trouble. Some dark place inside him was certain of it. So he cut in again, "I know, but I'm leaving."

Dr Philips shot a desperate look at Flack, who shrugged, recognising defeat. "I'll keep an eye on him, doc."

He sighed. "Alright then, you're discharged." He held up his hands. "Against my recommendation, but I guess I lose. If you drop dead, don't blame me. I'll get the paperwork." He backed out of the room.

"I've got a change of clothes back at the lab," Mac said, before Flack could voice the disapproval which was written all over his face.

Flack instead gave a reluctant grin, and used his foot to push a duffel bag into view, from where it had been hidden beneath the bed. "Actually, Danny brought this with him. He thought you might want it. Apparently no one in your lab has the least bit of sense."

Mac raised an eyebrow. "Stop pretending, Don, you want to be trying to find Stella as much as I do, not waiting cooped up in here."

"Yeah," Flack admitted, and sighed. "Yeah, I do. Alright, I'll wait for you outside."

-

The young journalist got to the scene just as the squad car pulled away, trailing a black SUV. He sighed, knowing that by now there would likely be nothing worth photographing, if there had ever been anything. Some murders were more newsworthy than others, and although nondescript middle-aged men rated higher on that scale than homeless people, or junkies, they weren't often worth a proper story unless they turned out to be someone important. By the lack of other news vultures, he guessed that wasn't the case today.

But still, he parked down the street and walked across the square with his notebook and camera, and laptop slung in a bag over one shoulder, just in case. After all, this was why he had been sent on this scouting mission – they were always looking for the story that no one else had. If the man turned out to be someone important, or the victim of a serial killer like the taxi cab murderer – he shuddered at the memory – then it certainly wouldn't hurt the paper to have exclusive pictures and information.

However, the scene was disappointing. Only the slightly crushed plants and the yellow tape distinguished it as a place where a crime had been committed. Dutifully, he took a couple of photographs, and then, unwilling to drive back to his office immediately, crossed to the café at the other side of the square and selected a table with a good view of the scene, and a cup of coffee to go with it. Dark clouds were hanging threateningly in the sky, but he trusted the awning to keep away errant drops of rain. He opened his laptop, and began working on his current article.

He glanced up now and then, people watching, out of a habit he now cultivated. He was practiced at picking out people who seemed interesting, people who might have a story about them. So from time to time, when he glanced up from the screen, he found his eyes following the woman holding the hand of a toddler, both of them with a face-paint butterfly spreading wings across their cheeks, and looking not in the least bit embarrassed about it, the girl in a high-school uniform who was reading a book as she walked, not lifting her head to steer around obstacles and people, the man with a baseball cap pulled low on his bent head and hands stuffed deep in his pockets, an air of furtiveness surrounding him, passing close enough to the café that the dirt on his pant knees was noticeable…

The man strode across the square, and stopped by the flowerbeds, standing there just slightly too casually. He glanced around him, and held his arm out. Something metallic flashed in the dull light as it fell. He remained for a few seconds, and then strode off, passing the tables again, not sparing a glance for the customers.

He had dropped something onto where the crime scene had been. That was too much of an opportunity to pass by. The young journalist hesitated for a second, looking around him. He caught the eye of a Latino woman half-reading a book, bopping her head slightly to the tunes leaking out of the single earphone she was wearing. "Excuse me?" he asked. "Would you mind watching my stuff for a minute, please?"

"Sure thing, hon," she assured him.

He picked up his camera, and walked over to the flowerbed. A few of the plants were beginning to wilt, their stalks crushed by the weight of the body that had lain on them. He crouched down. A dull cloth bag now lay on a patch of bare earth.

A rudimentary knowledge of crime scenes made him pause before touching it, but he reasoned that it could quite possibly be a piece of trash carelessly tossed away, the location of its landing a coincidence.

In case it _wasn't_ a coincidence (he didn't really believe it was; his job had taught him well), he snapped several photos with his camera, from a couple of different angles. Then he loosened the drawstring, shaking out the contents.

A necklace slithered out to the ground. It seemed vaguely familiar, but he didn't wait to place it, tilting the bag, so that the other, larger item, fell out to join it. It landed face up. A police badge.

Suddenly he realised where he had seen the necklace before.

He remembered to take another photograph, and then stood up quickly, searching his cell for the number he needed. He dialled, waited impatiently, until an artificial voice informed him that the man he was trying to reach was currently unavailable. He tried the other number he had, and this time heard the telephone at the end of the line ring. "Pick up," he muttered. "Come on, pick up!"

-

Lindsay sat in front of a computer, willing AFIS to flick faster through its kaleidoscope of prints. The flashing sequence of them was almost mesmerising.

The print she was currently seeking a match for was one she had pulled from the shoe of the John Doe in the square. He had already been excluded as its donor. She didn't know where Danny and Hawkes were, but imagined that they were probably down in autopsy with Sid.

A telephone's ring pulled her out of her thoughts, and continued ringing without an answer. As she thought about going to find it, the noise stopped. She shook her head slightly and turned back to the screen. A few seconds later, the irritating sound started up again. Not wanting to continue letting it ring fruitlessly, she got up, and opened the door of the print lab, moving down the corridor towards the source of the noise.

Mac's office. She got there just as the unanswered phone on his desk again fell silent.

She hesitated in the doorway, not wanting to enter without permission, but then the ringing started again. Anyone trying so hard to get in contact probably had something important to say. Praying hard that it wouldn't be Sinclair, she walked over to Mac's desk, her feet sounding traitorously loud against the floor, and picked up the handset. "Detective Taylor's phone."

"Uh – is Mac there?" The voice was male, and unfamiliar.

"He isn't at the moment, but I can take a message. Who is this please?"

"My name's Reed Garret, I really need to speak to him…"

She knew who he was, of course, and hesitated again, before coming to a decision to tell him the truth. "My name's Lindsay Monroe, I'm one of Mac's CSIs. He's in the hospital."

"Is he ok?" The worry in his voice hitched up a level.

"He will be," she said quickly, to reassure herself as well. "I can take a message, for him, if you like?"

A pause. "You're a CSI? Do you know about the man they found in a flowerbed ?"

She blinked confusedly. "Yes, I'm one of the people working that case. Why, do you have information?"

"I think so…" He paused again. "Um, is Stella ok?"

Her head involuntarily jerked up, and she felt her eyes widen. "Why are you asking?"

"Because some guy just dropped a police badge and necklace onto the place where the dead man was found. And… I think I've seen Stella wear that necklace."

"What's the badge number?" she asked, her voice sharp.

"8946."

It took a second, her mind blanking to save herself from the horror of the realisation, but then the memories were there, in pitiless focus, replaying Stella arriving at scenes, Stella moving back her jacket to show her badge, Stella holding it up as she introduced herself to witnesses. Stella carrying it with pride, teaching Lindsay to do the same.

Stella…

_Damn._ No more denying that anything was wrong. She remembered that Reed was still waiting for her to speak, and her voice sounded strained and brittle to herself. "Are you still at the crime scene?"

"Yeah. What should I do? Is it – hers?"

She disregarded his second question, not wanting to make the answer real by saying it aloud. "Stay where you are, and don't touch anything. Someone'll be right along."

"Sure."

She replaced the handset, and was already pulling her cell from her pocket as she left the office, pressing a speed-dial button. Danny finally answered as she was pushing open the door to the lab she had just vacated in a hurry.

"Messer."

"It's Lindsay…"

She caught sight of the computer screen, and her voice trailed away.

"Linds? What is it?"

"Um… something's come up," she said, the mockery of the understatement ringing in her ears. "I think… where are you?"

"In AV. You still running prints?" He obviously recognised the tension in her voice, not waiting for a reply. "I'll be right there."

She let her hand with the cell drop to her side, her eyes still fixed on the screen. The print match that the database had found was flashing contentedly. The name didn't change on rereading.

Stella Bonasera.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: Hi! Long time no see! *Embarassed face* I'm currently being held hostage by _lily moonlight_ - she's got me locked in her cottage's celler and is withholding tea until this gets posted :P **

**I realise that updates have been few and far between recently, so I'm pleased to announce that this story is now finished. All the chapters are written out, so I just need to edit them into completeness before uploading them. I thought that it was better to wait until I could say that before posting any more sporadic chapters ;)**

**As always, thank you very much for all reviews, alerts and favourites! I do hope that you guys are still interested in reading the remainder of this story! Please do drop a comment - all opinions are very much welcomed!**

* * *

Time. Time was against them. Mac paced the floor of his office, his steps in rhythm with the clock on one wall, ticking away the seconds with cold regularity. Seconds and minutes which couldn't be regained. One by one, the seconds and minutes and hours for which Stella had been missing piled higher and higher, as outside, traffic lights changed from red to green to red to green to red, and leaves were plucked from branches by the wind and tossed to the sky and then discarded. One by one.

But of course, once the bustle of returning to the lab was over, the flurry of catching up with the information collected, there was nothing that he could do. Nothing but wait.

Reed was in one of the conference rooms, describing the man who he had seen drop Stella's necklace and badge to a sketch artist. Mac was having to restrain himself from going in there and staring over the artist's shoulder, but he knew that he would only be a hindrance.

Knowing that, though, didn't make it any easier to bear. He wanted, needed, to be helping, to be _doing_. He closed his eyes, desperately trying to imagine that his frantic pacing was bringing him closer to her.

Had anyone checked her apartment? He realised that he hadn't asked, and no one had mentioned it. She had disappeared between the out-of-town location from which she had sent the text, and arriving at the hospital to see him, after all, but maybe there would be some clue that she had left behind. At least to where she had been during the day, and possibly the previous day too.

_Anything._

He walked to the window that formed the outside wall, stared down at the faceless people striding past, at the cars rolling by with their oblique windows closed. Glassy eyes sliding down the grey roads. A whole city full of eyes, full of people, yet it was so easy to lose someone within them. And not one of those eyes would ever see anything.

A drop of rain thudded against the glass pane. And another. Driven almost horizontally by the wind, more and more began to batter and rattle against the glass, blurring it, so that he could only see vague outlines of the car-filled road and the other buildings. Down below, coats were wrapped close around bodies, and sombre-coloured umbrellas opened like a blooming of weeds. It was already growing dim, the heavy clouds hastening the early evening gloom.

A rapping at the door, barely louder than the rain's vicious assault, broke through his thoughts. He turned to see Hawkes standing there, hand already raised to knock again. "Reed's done with the description."

He didn't need telling twice.

Hawkes made no attempt at conversation as they strode down the corridors. Nor did Reed, when Mac shoved the door open without knocking. He just sent a faint, anxious smile his way as the sketch artist handed him the pad of paper she had drawn on.

"That's definitely the guy I saw," Reed said, breaking the silence. He didn't appear to be offended by Mac's abruptness.

"I've never seen him before," Hawkes said, a needless apology in his voice. "Flack doesn't recognise him, either."

Mac started slightly as he realised that he had walked straight past Flack, who was leaning against the wall beside the door, without registering his presence. He stared at the picture again. Something about the man's features seemed faintly familiar.

"Do you know who he is?" Flack asked.

Mac stared a moment longer, but the brief recognition was gone, and he shook his head. "Distribute the picture," he instructed. "Hawkes, run it through the biometric database. We might get lucky; we've had matches from pencil sketches before."

"Sorry I didn't get more," Reed said, his voice heavy.

Part of Mac wanted to ask him why he hadn't stopped the guy, hadn't noticed anything about him that would immediately mark him out from anyone else, but he knew that was unfair. There was no way that Reed could have known, even if he had been aware at that point that Stella was potentially missing. He was a reporter, not a cop. Mac turned his back, walking to the photocopier which stood in the far corner of the room, and made five copies. He watched as they fell into the tray, one on top of the other, the movement as they did so almost making the drawing seem alive for a second. Something flickered in his memory.

"Sean," he said, almost without realising that the word was leaving his mouth.

"What's that?" Flack asked sharply.

Mac turned back to face them. "He's called Sean. This man."

"How do you know?" There was hope in Flack's voice.

It was already gone from Mac's. "I don't know. I just – It just came into my head. I'm sure that's his name, but I don't – I don't know how I know that."

Mac didn't miss the look Flack set to Hawkes, who immediately pulled one of the copies from the copier's tray, and turned to Reed. "It'd be helpful if you could be there while I run this through the biometric data base, for verification." Reed nodded, and got up. Hawkes caught the eye of the sketch artist, who also stood up and followed them out of the room.

"That was quick," Mac commented dryly, finding himself alone with Flack, who shrugged.

"Why look at me? I didn't do anything."

Mac reluctantly half-smiled. "Ok. You need me to remember why I know this man's name."

"Pretty much. But I think you'd better sit down first."

Mac dropped into the nearest chair, surprised to find how much he welcomed its support. His head was pounding. Flack was watching him closely, and Mac stopped himself from rubbing his forehead. Instead he briefly closed his eyes, trying to picture the drawing as a real person. Then he opened them again. "I don't know. I don't remember seeing him, only his name."

"So you could have seen him in the papers, or even in our databank?"

"I suppose so." He groaned in frustration. "This man almost certainly knows something about Stella, if he didn't abduct her. And I should know who he is, but I _can't remember_!"

Flack placed a hand on his shoulder. "Mac, don't be too harsh on yourself. You should still be being treated in hospital for a severe concussion, not running around the lab."

Mac's eyes flashed fire, and he shrugged away Flack's hand. "That _doesn't matter_, Don. Whether or not there're circumstances preventing me from remembering, it doesn't make a damn sight of difference to Stella, does it?" He stood up, and began pacing the room angrily. "Some bastard's got hold of her, and sent us her things to torment us. And I _should know who he is_!" He put a hand out and leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. He closed his eyes for a second.

…_she'll probably be a while…_

…_a black coat over a chair…_

…_Sean…_

The flashes of memory were gone. He found himself rubbing his neck, a slightly raised sore area, where an insect had apparently bitten him at some point.

"You ok?" Flack asked.

He ignored the question, remembering one he himself had to ask. "Has anyone been to Stella's apartment yet?"

"I don't think so…"

"Then we're going there now – "

"No, Mac, _you_ are – "

"Going to Stella's apartment."

Flack opened his mouth, as if he was thinking of arguing, but then closed it again and said nothing.

* * *

Gina nearly bumped into the man as she made a rather ungracious dash through the rain from the cab to her apartment building, shouldering her way in through the doors as he was trying to get out through them.

"I'm very sorry," she apologised, slightly breathless from her dash across the street. She didn't recognise him. "I haven't met you. My name is Gina." She slid the loops of her shopping bag to the crook of her elbow so that she could shake hands. Her parents had told her that she should be polite to everyone sharing the building with her.

She had received the same advice from her childhood friend, Natalie, whom she had followed to America from Poland, and who had, by her own account, almost immediately found herself many new friends, and had peppered her frequent emails with photographs of them. But Natalie was much louder and more confident than Gina was. So far, she hadn't met with the same sort of successes. She had yet to find a good friend in the city. Most of her new neighbours were polite and nice enough, but they didn't really have time for her. And this man seemed like he had even less.

In fact, he looked as if he was about to ignore her, and she felt her heart sink at having embarrassed herself. But then he shook her hand, holding it loosely and quickly dropping it. "Hi."

"I'm sorry, I – " she caught him glancing towards the door, and her voice trailed off awkwardly. "I have just moved here. I don't know yet your name..." .

"I'm in a hurry," he said shortly.

Ashamed of her forwardness, and put at a loss by his rebuttal, she stood back as he moved past her as if she was no longer there, limping slightly, and shifting the position of the large bag on his back. Some sort of binoculars, or goggles, in a case, were shoved only half in the outside pocket. Maybe he liked birds, as she did, but even if they happened to meet again, she doubted that she'd dare to ask him.

She stood in the middle of the entrance for a while, as stray beads of water dripped from the ends of her long hair. It was lonely sometimes, being all by herself in a strange country. So many people in this big city, and no one seemed to notice her at all.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: So, I was organised enough to have this chapter ready for posting, and the site goes down :P Ok, I meant to have it up on Friday evening, but missed my train even with lily's slightly reckless driving... Once she'd released me from the cellar, of course.  
**

**Thank you again for all the reviews, alerts and favourites, and please do continue with them! :D Lovely to know people are still reading despite the rather long downtime :) Thanks too to _lily moonlight_ for the read-through.  
**

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Stella breathed, slowly, deeply, focusing on the movement. In. Out. In. Out. Her eyes were closed, and she didn't open them. Somehow, there no longer seemed any point in doing so. The world for her had shrunk; reduced to a hard wall and a hard floor, and a semicircle of blackness just larger than her reach. Her broken arm burned, the bone replaced by a firebrand, a white-hot core of molten iron, but she had also begun shivering, lightly, but uncontrollably. Her throat was dry, and lined with rough sandpaper which rasped as she swallowed. But she had dropped the bottle of drink from fingers drained of strength, and it had rolled away and disappeared, lost somewhere in the nothing which surrounded her.

"Please," she whispered to the darkness, not even a prayer, only a wish. "Please, someone, find me."

* * *

Neither of the men spoke during the drive. Flack's mouth was pressed into a grim line as he clenched the steering wheel with unnecessary force. Mac stared out of the windows, unconsciously fingering the rough line of stitches on his forehead as the blocks seemed to crawl past, painfully slowly.

The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, and the wipers squeaked softly against the glass of the windscreen as they scraped back and forth. As the car juddered impatiently at a red light, seeds dropped heavily from an overhanging sycamore, too sodden to even spin as they fell. They thudded against the passenger-side windows, and stayed attached as the car once again turned into a new lane of traffic, trapped in corners, stuck to the glass by the layer of water.

But they arrived at last.

A sense of déjà vu pressed over Mac in the elevator – the feeling of missing something that was desperately important, something which he still couldn't remember. He exhaled sharply in frustration, a gesture which probably didn't go unnoticed by Flack, who was watching him closely and not even bothering to try and hide it. His facial expression suggested that _he_ was the one being worried about, which was ridiculous, when it was Stella who was in trouble.

They strode along the corridor, towards Stella's door, and he realised that, despite everything, he was half-expecting it to open, and Stella to appear, raising her eyebrows despairingly at their concern. Of course, it didn't, and nor did she.

Mac's eyes were pulled to an empty section of scuffed skirting board level with his foot. For some reason, he was surprised to see that it was empty. He had been expecting to see something there. _What?_

Flack rang the bell, seemingly out of habit, and then stopped himself as it jangled, the sound bright but muffled behind the painted wood. He stepped out of the way and Mac slid his key into the lock, turned it (why did that sequence of movement feel like such a recent memory?), and pushed the door open. Both men had hands on their weapons. Flack flicked on the light.

The apartment was empty. No life. All the appliances they could see were switched off. A clean bowl sat with a spoon next to an unopened box of cereal on the counter of the kitchenette.

All of this, Mac took in with one glance. With his second, his gaze was caught, fixed and held by the far wall, the section between the entrance to the kitchenette and the passage leading to the bedroom and bathroom.

Blood. A thick, dark smear of dried blood standing out starkly against the white paint.

Flack had seen it too, and they hurriedly converged to that. The shape and height of the stain lead to a ready conclusion from both men, drawn from years of experience. "Someone had their head slammed against this wall," Flack said finally. "With a lot of force."

Mac nodded, slowly. "We were wrong. She got home."

"And stopped for food? Knowing that you were unconscious in the hospital? That's not like her. Besides, it was later than breakfast time."

"You're right." He noticed something else that was odd, out of place. "And that rug over on the floor shouldn't be there. It's usually in her bedroom."

"Glove?" Flack asked. Mac pulled one from his pocket, and tossed it across. Flack laid it over his fingers and folded the small rug back, a little at first, and then flipping it over completely.

The section of carpet that should have been beneath it was gone. Edges cleanly sliced away, a sloping almost-rectangle missing, about a foot by a foot-and-a-half.

"She was abducted from here," Mac said, his voice certain. But jagged around the edges, no matter how hard he fought to keep it steady. "Whatever happened here, whoever did this, cleaned up. They took the bloody piece of carpet with them."

"How do you know that the missing piece of carpet had blood on?" Flack asked, his expression and voice sharp.

"I don't …" He had been sure, for a moment. But the surety had already fluttered away. "I don't know. It just seemed..." He paused for a second. "Assume that there _was_ blood here. Why go to great lengths to take it away, but leave the blood on the wall?"

"You look as if you already know the answer."

He nodded. "Don, she must have fought back! Why else remove only one piece of evidence, unless it's the piece of evidence that can implicate him? If there was blood on the floor, it would be _his_ blood."

Flack sighed heavily. "But now it's gone. And all we've got are more questions."

* * *

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Stella's head lifted, and her eyes opened, wide and staring, although the action was as useless as it had ever been. "Who's there?" she faltered, hating how weak her voice sounded. How weak she was.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Slow but certain footsteps, drawing ever nearer. But no one could get in. She couldn't get out, and no one could get in.

Nevertheless, someone was there with her.

She knew who she wanted it to be. "Mac?" she whispered, desperate in her hope.

"Yes." The reply slithered towards her through the dark, a single syllable, but her heart leapt.

"Are you real?" she asked.

"Of course I'm real. I came to find you, Stella. It's me."

She couldn't tell. In the blackness she couldn't tell if it was really him. Even the sound of her own voice seemed distorted. "Can you put the light on?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" he asked, sounding faintly puzzled. "It's not dark." She struggled to process that, but he was already speaking again before her fogged mind could understand. "Here, drink this." He put something onto the floor next to her, and guided her hand onto it. A large plastic bottle. She heard him crack the seal open as he unscrewed the cap. "Drink," he prompted.

She lifted it slowly, her arm shaking with the effort, and as she raised it to her face some of the liquid splashed out, running down her chin and onto her shirt. But she ignored it, and took a sip, the water blissfully cool and soothing as it slid down her burning throat. It brought some clarity to her pounding head.

"Who are you?" she asked, not really sure if she wanted to hear a real answer. It would be so easy to close her eyes again and just keep on pretending that she was safe now…

"Mac Taylor."

"No you aren't." It had been there for her to hear clearly that time, the _wrongness_ of his voice. Close, a good imitation, but not quite there. And the footsteps had been wrong too.

"Clever, aren't you?" His voice changed, became smooth, slippery. She heard him crouch down next to her, and shrank away from him.

"Get away from me!" she hissed.

"There's no point doing that," he reprimanded. "I can move a lot faster than you, right now. And you'll need to save your strength." He might as well have been talking about the weather, for all the emotion that showed in his voice.

"For what? What are you doing?" She wanted to be angry, to be furious, to overpower him and force him to let her out of this nightmare. But she couldn't. She didn't have the strength to summon it.

"Don't worry." She heard the quiet rustle of his clothes as he moved. And then there was a hand on her forehead, and she half-jumped at the touch, gasping out loud, partly from revulsion at his skin pressed against hers, and partly with the pain caused by her sudden movement. She didn't try and move his hand away, though. He was much stronger than her. However much she hated it, he was right about that. She couldn't fight him while he could disable her so easily.

His hand was very cold. After a few seconds he removed it. "I hope your fever goes down," he remarked, conversationally. "You'll last much longer down here without it."

Then a rustle again as he stood. The tap, tap, tap of his footsteps. As she listened to them, it seemed that he was putting more weight on one foot than the other, and trying to hide it. Not that that knowledge was of any use to her.

"Come back!" she called, with as much strength and volume as she could muster. "Let me go!"

He didn't.


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N: So I seem to be back on a posting schedule, which is always good :) Thanks very much as always for the reviews - they're great encouragement to keep working on this! The last chapter didn't seem to be very popular, though - I do hope that you're still enjoying reading this story, please do let me know.**

**Thanks to _lily moonlight_ for the read-through!**

**

* * *

**Adam counted lights.

He was trying not to; had tried again and again not to, but every time he let his attention slip, that was what he found himself doing. Counting off moments in time with the blinking lights with which the lab always seemed to be full. Somehow, there seemed to be more of them than usual, and more sounds too. Soft beeps and whirs which he usually found soothing, but not now. Now, they hummed and whined with impatience, asking him why he was being so slow. Why he hadn't found anything yet.

_Don't you care about Stella?_

But there was nothing else _for_ him to be doing. He could only wait for the machines to work their magic, and for CODIS to spit out a name. Two names, but no one doubted that the blood on the wall belonged to Stella. It was the other name that they were waiting for, counting on. The name contained within the fibres of the underside of the rug which he had poured over, examining them with a lens, working as delicately as he knew how to find the almost miniscule specks of blood transferred between the layers of material.

He went over the process again and again in his mind as he waited, too restless to sit, instead moving from one machine to another to check on their progress, almost expecting for something to go wrong, for something to break, and for all their leads to be lost. His foot tapped against the floor in an irregular rhythm, and the fingers of his right hand twisted the sleeve cuff of the left, but he didn't notice until the cloth was twisted tight enough to bite into his skin.

He pictured the processes running inside the machines as he waited, remembering triumphantly cutting away the stained fibres. He imagined the DNA molecules contained within them splitting, replicating, reforming, growing to a sample large enough for sequencing, imagined the four DNA bases transformed to twenty-six, spelling out a label they could recognise.

The computer running the CODIS databank beeped, and Adam spun round in his chair, grabbing the end of the paper as soon as it emerged from the printer, still warm, and holding it impatiently as it finished printing, fighting against the impulse to drag it out faster. Almost simultaneously, the machine running the second sample spat out its own piece of paper, but he let it drop neglected into the tray, busy as he was scanning the one he held. But at the same time, he hardly dared to look at the page in case the result would be one of disappointment.

It wasn't.

It held a name.

"Sean Perry," he muttered, forcibly injecting venom into his voice. He didn't spend time typing the details into the database to find out why he was in the system. Mac had expressively told him not to wait, to bring him information as soon as there was any at all to bring. He picked up the other printout, automatically checking what it said.

He stopped. Re-read it. And then again. It _couldn't_ be right. But on the paper, the sample sequence matched perfectly with the sequence the database had matched it against. The internal reference sample.

_But that would mean..._

His feet carried him quickly through the hallways, clattering against the hard floor, and he barely registered that people were hastily stepping out of his path. He barrelled into Mac's office without knocking, or even pausing at the door, something he would never normally dare to do.

"You have something?" Mac asked, instantly.

There were far more eyes in Mac's office than he had first realised. Mac, paused in the act of pacing the floor, the white dressing on the side of his forehead barely standing out against the pallor of his face, his eyes burning. Reed, balanced on the edge of Mac's desk, holding some typed pages which were presumably his statement, but lowering them quickly to turn towards him. Hawkes, leaning against the glass of one of the darkened windows, his back to the night-lit city spread below him, concerned for now with those inside the walls. Flack was there too, but turned away from the others, talking quietly into his cell.

"Good, yeah, keep me posted," he was saying, before sliding it shut, and also turning to stare at Adam, who for a second felt himself shrinking back under their combined pressure and intensity, and opened and closed his mouth without sound. But he rallied. Stella was depending on him.

"Results," he said quickly, breathlessly. "There was blood transfer on the underside of the rug. Came back to a CODIS match. Some guy called Sean Perry."

"You were right, Mac," Flack said. "Presumably on both counts. There _was_ blood on the missing carpet, and I'm assuming that this Sean guy is the same as the one you recognised and Reed saw. Got a photo, Adam?"

Adam shook his head guiltily. "Mac wanted information as soon as I had it. I didn't wait to do a database search." He glanced at Mac for confirmation, who nodded.

"That's good work." He put out a hand for the printouts, Hawkes already moving to look over his shoulder.

"Wait," Adam said. "There's more. The blood on the wall – it wasn't Stella's."

All the attention in the room immediately switched back to him, and he felt his cheeks redden slightly from the four sets of piercing stares. "_Not_ Stella's?" Flack asked, raising his eyebrows. "But why would he clear up one set of his blood, and leave the other? That doesn't make sense."

The words were tripping over themselves in their haste to be out of Adam's mouth. "No – no – it's not Perry's either. It's Mac's. Mac's blood."

* * *

Gina wished that she knew what to do. Among the reams of advice that her parents had given her once they had had accepted that she _really was_ going to move to America, one piece was standing out in her mind. _Stay away from the police. Keep out of trouble, and you'll be fine._ But what about situations like the one she was in right now?

She watched the news almost religiously each night, and read various news blogs, trying to soak in as much as possible of this new country that she had chosen for herself. Natalie had lent her a stack of DVDs, to 'help' her with this goal, but they seemed to consist almost entirely of gunfights and horse riding, things which so far appeared to be rather scarse in New York City, so she had quickly turned back to mining CNN and Fox, as well as local stations, for information on events, politics, even the outcomes of sports matches.

But her current dilemma was caused by a very different news item. A sketch of a face had appeared as the headline story, with the announcement that the man was wanted as a suspect by the police. Supposedly, a police officer had disappeared.

The same face belonging to the man who had cut through her awkward introductions earlier.

Ever since she had seen that story, it had nagged at her, preventing her from concentrating on anything that could block it out, finally sending her off to bed early to take refuge in sleep which wouldn't come. She lay beneath the covers, clutching a somewhat worn stuffed bear which was hidden at the back of the wardrobe whenever Natalie and her loud friends came to visit, and tried to think about what, if anything, she should do.

But she must be mistaken. He couldn't possibly be the man that the police were after; she wasn't the kind of person who met people wanted by law, and surely, if that _had_ been the man, wouldn't someone who had kidnapped a police officer look more, well, evil? To her he had just seemed rude, and maybe tired.

Besides, if he _was_ the man, someone else would have already called the police by now. She couldn't be the only one to notice the resemblance.

* * *

"I don't know," Mac was saying again, desperately, rubbing one hand into his temple. "I don't remember."

"Do you know _why_ you would have gone round to Stella's?"

"No!" he snapped. "Don, you've asked me!"

Flack seemed unperturbed, his gaze and voice level, counterpointing Mac's rising stress. "I know that. But anything you _can_ remember, Mac, anything at all, could help us."

Mac slapped the flat of his hand down hard against his desk. The sound was like a gunshot. "Goddamn it, I DON'T KNOW! If I did, do you really think I wouldn't have told you? Do you really think I would have held back anything that could help us find Stella?"

Hawkes cut through the argument. He had been using Mac's computer, feeding in the data provided by Adam, who for the moment hovered in a corner, all but unnoticed, but unable to make himself leave when staying might mean picking up another lead, or at least another crumb of information. "Sean Perry. Age 48. Served twenty-two years for first degree murder – he was paroled for good behaviour, and released this March. Reed, is this the man you saw?"

He twisted the screen around. Reed looked closely at the photograph. "Yes, that's him."

"Certain?"

He nodded firmly. "Certain."

"Address?" Mac asked.

Hawkes shook his head. "After he was released, he missed his appointments with his parole officer and dropped off the radar. His current address isn't known."

"We'll broadcast this everywhere," Flack said. "_Someone_ has to know where he lives. I'll call around the hospitals too – that much carpet removed, there was probably a lot of blood. He might have had stitches."

Hope. For the first time, there was hope. No one dared to speak its name, but it pulsed in the room, pushing back the darkness outside.

* * *

Reed Garrett's news blog had been updated overnight, while Gina had tossed uneasily in her bed. The previous top story had disappeared, replaced by that of the missing police officer. There was the sketch of the suspect that had been broadcast over the television, and a new picture now, a photograph. And a name. No doubt now -- the man in the photograph was definitely the man she had met. She read over the article again. _He may be injured_... She remembered his limp. And although he hadn't told her his name, there was in their building an S. Perry, whose mailbox adjoined hers, and whose owner she had never happened to meet.

The screen also held a picture of the missing police officer too, whose shock of curls reminded Gina of her older sister. And she thought, _what if…_

She glanced at the clock in the corner of the computer screen. Just past six in the morning. The police would be early risers, wouldn't they? And if they had already received a flood of calls, well, she would just have to apologise, and hope that they didn't mind her wasting their time.

For a moment more, she hesitated, her father's voice ringing in her ears. But then she picked up one of the small framed photographs sitting on her desk and squeezed it tight in her hand, so that the frame bit into her palm. Suppose that instead of this policewoman, Suzy had been taken, and someone knew where the kidnapper was, but did nothing about it…

Gina took a deep breath, clutched the photograph, and picked up the telephone.


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N: Um, hello. It's been a little while since I updated this! So massive apologies, but no excuses, since you're probably sick of hearing me come up with them. If you're still reading this, you're amazing, basically!**

* * *

The police had arrived.

Them finding him had always been just a matter of time. He had known that all along, and had planned for it. But he had hoped for another few days, at least. He lived in _New York_, after all, where millions of people dwelt unseen behind reflective windows, never seeing anything through the glass other than their own reflections staring back at them.

But then photographs of him had appeared across the news. He hadn't expected that. He thought he'd been more careful.

He had been planning to move out altogether. Nothing sentimental about his apartment, and, after all, it was where he could first be connected. The first half of his supplies had already been moved, and were arranged around his blanket bed, near the trapdoor. Just one more lot, and there would be enough to last both him and his…friend… for a couple of weeks. Enough time for the frenzied media hunt to die away, and for him to change his appearance to his satisfaction. He'd already cut his hair shorter, and dyed it black, but he knew that on its own it wouldn't be enough.

But he'd only just got dressed when he heard the knocking on his apartment door. He had known immediately who it was. The NYPD had no proper regard for doorbells.

He was prepared. One thing linking him to the place where he kept her, and it was waiting next to the kitchen sink, with a matchbox. He opened the bedroom door, took the fourteen steps necessary.

Rapping on the door again. "NYPD! Open up!"

He ignored it. Let them have their fun. If they were here then he would never be coming back to this apartment anyway. He struck a match, and held up the deed of ownership. It was under a fake name, of course, but it had the address on.

He could have burnt it at any time before this. But he had been through this moment in his mind so many times that he was unable to resist this single dramatic flair.

There was a crash. He pictured the door smashing open, policemen in their dark uniforms swarming into his hallway, like ants. He held the flame to the edge of the piece of paper. It leapt up to meet it, jumping across as the paper began to singe brown, and then flaring up, a line of hungry fire, racing across and devouring, black printed letters crumbling, becoming dust.

He head the first shouts of, "Clear! Clear!", and waited. Scorching currents of wavering air bit at his fingers, and he dropped the remains of the paper into the sink.

The door to the kitchen was kicked open. A man in a bullet-proof vest, taller than him, with cropped black hair, was aiming a gun at him. "Don't move!" he yelled.

In the sink, the last scraps of paper crumbled to little heaps of ash.

"Sean Perry?" the armed cop demanded.

"I'm quite sure you know that already."

More shouts of "Clear!", and Sean smiled. It wasn't going to be quite so easy for them this time. He had been careless once already in this game, so he had taken greater care.

Another cop entered, said something quietly.

The tall one turned back to him. "Where is she?" he demanded, his voice strident and not quiet at all. "What have you done with her?"

Sean smiled graciously. "I'm terribly sorry, gentlemen, but I think there must have been some kind of mistake. What exactly _am_ I supposed to have done?"

"You know exactly what you've done, you son-of-a-bitch! Where is she? Where's Stella?"

"I believe I have the right to remain silent."

The cop advanced angrily towards him, and spun him around roughly by his shoulder. Sean didn't resist as his wrists were grabbed, arms wrenched back, and cold handcuffs clicked into place, biting his skin as they were ratcheted too tight.

Maybe he could file a lawsuit for that.

The corridor was full of people pressed in doorways and against walls. Nosy neighbours, wanting to see what all the fuss and noise was about, but not wanting to get too close. Not wanting to be a part of it. He glanced quickly over them, his eyes settling on the Polish girl, Gina. She hung her flushed face shamefully as he was led past.

"Sorry," she whispered, and he almost laughed.

There was a female cop, with dark hair, standing next to her. "Don't apologise," she said firmly. "You've done a very good thing."

Sean looked back and winked at Gina as he was guided around the corner.

The woman caught up to them next to the squad car. Her steps were quick and sharp, as was her voice. "Flack, did you find – "

"No."

- - - - -

He wasn't particularly impressed by the Spartan interrogation room. Painted breeze-block walls and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and a table and set of chairs so plain that they were practically only lines. Very melodramatic, even without the one-way mirror taking up much of the opposite wall. He stared into it, and decided that he rather liked the look of his new black hair.

It was a surprisingly short time between him being led in, and the entrance of his interrogators. They were probably desperate for the information that he could give them, if so inclined. They would know by now that there was none to be had from his apartment.

The cop who had arrested him, Flack, entered first, a paper cup of coffee in his hand. That would be a prop, possibly to try and make him look unconcerned, although the tension in every muscle of his body betrayed him. Following him was the one Sean already knew.

"Well, Detective Taylor. Nice to be seeing you again."

"Shut up," Flack snapped. He glanced at Taylor, and they both sat down.

"How's your head, Detective Taylor?" Sean asked, with his best impression of concern. He was rewarded by seeing a mixture of anger and confusion chase across Taylor's face in a brief moment before a shutter slammed down on it. He smiled. Taylor probably had no clear memory of what had happened at their last encounter. If slamming his head against the wall hadn't removed the memory, the cocktail of drugs injected into his jugular certainly would have.

"What have you done with Stella?" Taylor demanded. His voice was level and his face was now carefully blank, but a furnace smouldered within his eyes, barely held in check.

"I'm sorry, but who precisely is Stella?"

"Don't fuck with us," Flack said, his tone ice-calm, deadly menacing. "Detective Stella Bonasera. Where. Is. She?"

"Why're you asking me?" Sean drew a pleasant smile onto his face. "I think you should be asking that question to Detective Taylor there."

"Mac, do you – " Flack began, but was interrupted by a shake of the head.

"Oh, you know perfectly well what happened, _Mac_."

Flack opened his mouth to cut him off, but Taylor again shook his head. "Let him talk."

They were probably hoping that he would drop some useful piece of information. But no matter its intent, this was the chance that Sean had been hoping for,_ rehearsing for,_ and he took it. "Well, I was passing through a corridor in Stella's apartment building, and I happened to notice raised voiced coming from behind a half open door – "

"What were you doing in Stella's building?" Flack asked harshly.

"I bought a microwave on eBay, from someone on her floor, and I was on my way to pick it up. Save on postage, you know? A Mr Lionel Strade." He thought with satisfaction about the exchange of emails on his computer. He'd even left the browser running. Mr Strade would indeed testify that he was supposed to have picked up the microwave at seven, but had never showed.

"Go on," Flack said through clenched teeth.

"Well, as I was saying, I heard raised voices. So I looked inside, and saw Detective Taylor here arguing quite _ferociously_ with a woman, who I now know was Detective Bonasera. Now, being a good citizen – " Flack let out a furious snort – "I called out and asked if everything was alright. At which point _Mac_ waved his badge and told me that everything was under control, and that I should move on."

Taylor's hands were clenched tightly into fists on the table, the skin white, the bones of his knuckles standing out sharply.

"So I went on, but I heard a scream, and turned back to see Taylor with his hands around Stella's neck. I ran in, and shouldered his head against the wall so that he dropped her, but he grabbed a butter knife from the counter and stabbed my thigh with it. I tried to fight back, but I passed out. When I came round, both of them were gone, and the piece of carpet tile where I bled out had been removed. I got the hell out of there."

"If that bullshit you're spinning is true," Flack said grimly, "Why didn't you call the cops, and say what had happened?"

Sean didn't answer straight away. He took another long look at Taylor. His face had lost the little colour that it had previously possessed, and his lips were pressed tightly shut. As if he didn't trust himself to speak, or as if he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he would be sick. Sean smiled inwardly and opened his eyes wide, innocently. "You see, I was afraid that the police would close ranks and concoct some story which the evidence might be persuaded to fit, painting _me_ as the attacker. I really am very sad to see that I was right."

"You sick fucker," Flack spat. "That's a pack of lies, and you know it! If that's the case, what were you doing when you were seen by a witness dropping Stella's necklace and badge into a flowerbed by a witness?"

So _that_ was where he had been seen. "I found them on the floor in Stella's apartment when I woke up," he said. "I dropped them outside in the hope that someone would find them, and be able to use them to bring Stella's killer to justice."

He had hoped that that word would have an effect on Taylor, and he wasn't disappointed. "Killer…" Taylor whispered, the word seemingly forcing its own way out through numbed, bloodless lips.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Sean said, trying his very hardest to sound sincere. To him it worked. He had always enjoyed acting. "I just assumed that she was dead. Did you think otherwise?"

Flack stood up, brought his fist crashing down onto the table. "Tell us where she is, NOW! I've had enough of your lies. Mac, I don't believe a word he's said, and you'd better not either!"

Mac didn't move.

Sean leant back in his chair, and crossed his arms over his chest. "I believe I'm entitled to a lawyer?"


	13. Chapter 13

**Have a new chapter?**

**_Lily moonlight_ definitely needs to be thanked for the re-emergence of this, since she's been poking me for months to get back to fanfic. And she beta read this. Thank you!**

**Massive thanks to everyone who's reviewed this so far, and especially to people who stumbled across a dead story and poked me about it. I really do appreciate it!**

**

* * *

**

Mac's face was blank, stunned. His breaths were coming fast and shallow.

Flack glanced from him to the mocking smile on Perry's face and made a decision. This had to be stopped. He gripped Mac's upper arm, pulling him out of his seat and out of the room with a speed and pressure which he knew was probably painful, but it was the lesser of two evils. He didn't look back, knowing that Perry had won this round, not wanting to see confirmation.

It was a short walk to the break room, and Mac didn't resist as he was led along. Two cops were skulking by the water-cooler but they didn't need to be told to leave – clearly Flack's expression was enough. "Sit down," he told Mac firmly, and emphasised the command by pushing him down onto a chair. He reached for a paper cup, and filled it. "Drink this."

Mac complied. His face held next to no colour. _We definitely shouldn't have let him leave the hospital._ He took a couple of sips of water, and spoke with some difficulty. "Don, do you think – "

"_No_." Flack could hear the defiance in his voice. It felt as if his whole body was blazing with fury. "Don't you _dare_ believe that bastard, Mac. Don't you _dare_."

Mac's voice, in contrast, was dead. "I don't remember. I don't remember what happened. The evidence doesn't contradict his story."

_Defeated_. Flack had seen many of Mac's moods, but he had never before seen him look so defeated. Because, of course, it wasn't just people like Sean Perry, people who radiated evil, who committed murder. They both knew that, only too well.

But not Mac. Never Mac.

"Listen to me," Flack said urgently. "Can you think of a situation, _any at all_, in which you would hurt Stella?"

A slight shake of the head, but nothing spoken. Flack groaned inside, barely containing his frustration. He hadn't seen Mac shut down like this since the Dobson fiasco, and then it had only been Stella who had managed to bring him out. Mac wasn't used to doubting himself. It was an emotion which he never wore well.

"Look. I refuse to believe that you attacked Stella. I don't want to believe that she's dead. This is still a missing person investigation, _not_ a murder one, and unless incontrovertible evidence turns up you aren't a suspect. She needs you to find her. The main suspect in her _disappearance_ is sitting in that room, spinning a pack of lies to try and confuse the case. You listen to him, start to doubt yourself, and he's won, you hear me?"

Mac leaned forwards, burying his face into his hands. "We have no leads. We don't know _what_ happened."

"We _do_ have a lead." Mac looked up at something in his voice. "We have a lead sitting in that room, at that table. He knows exactly what happened, and he knows exactly where Stella is now. He's playing a game with us, but sooner or later he's going to start talking. If it's the last thing I do, I'll make sure of that."

He meant it.

* * *

"Fuck this."

"Danny, calm down."

"Why the fuck should I calm down? This creep knows damn well where Stella is, and he isn't telling. I don't see what you're doing being so calm, Monroe!"

Lindsay turned to face him, arms akimbo. "Look, _Messer_, I get that you're angry. So'm I. I'm _furious_. But until that creep starts talking, we're all that Stella's got. So please, help me."

The mutiny slowly dwindled from Danny's face as the logic of her words reached him, and he nodded curtly. Rightly recognising that this was, for now, meant as acknowledgement and apology in one, she turned back to what she was doing, which was scanning the contents of the documentation on Sean Perry's desk and sorting it into piles. She had started out by allocating floor space for three; things that would be helpful in finding what had happened to Stella, things that might be helpful, and things that weren't. So far, nearly everything that she had glanced over and had been dropped straight on to the third pile. The second pile contained a couple of documents, put there more from hope than anything more concrete, and the first pile was still on empty space on the too-soft carpet, on which Danny was carelessly treading footprints of dirty rain water. She looked at them and felt a flash of misplaced guilt on his behalf.

Danny's search was less methodical. He was looking for anywhere that Perry might have stashed anything that he didn't want to be found. So far he had ripped books from bookcases, rifling through the pages, pulled picture frames from walls and disembowelled them; glass fronts, reproduction prints of Monet and Van Gough, and cardboard backings lying in untidy heaps; and shoved furniture away from walls to see what they might be concealing. So far, his search had left him empty-handed and dust-smudged.

She half-watched him as he knelt down by the wall and pulled at the edge of the carpet. It reminded firmly in place. Both of them shared the unspoken certainly that the only thing which Perry had judged too important to let them find was the heap of ashes in the sink. But saying it would make it final. They also weren't speaking about the neatly packed bags of supplies in the bedroom, but for quite a different reason; they were a source of hope. Hope as fragile as a soap bubble, but hope nonetheless. Hope that Stella might still be alive. That the supplies were for her.

Lindsay let out a sigh of sheer frustration. Danny stood up and walked over, standing in the empty patch directly to the right of the two piles of paper she had made. "Found anything?" he asked, pointlessly. The desk was bare, the drawers open and stripped even of their lining.

She said it anyway. "Nothing." She was tempted to tell him that he was standing in the floor space which was reserved for any important findings, but repressed it. It was, after all, just an empty piece of floor.

"What's next?"

"His trash."

"How many garbage cans?"

"Just the one in his kitchen."

Danny went to look, and returned almost immediately. "It's empty. Not lined, either. Are you in the mood for some dumpster diving?"

She rose, eager for action. Which would make it easier to pretend that she was doing something useful. Danny was already most of the way to the elevator by the time she made it to Perry's front door, but she still paused to tell the officer outside the door where they were going, and that they would be back. Probably.

She joined Danny in the elevator. He was restless, pacing inside the tiny space of the metal box, catching his reflection in the mirror and running his hand through his hair, while she was still.

The doors finally slid open at the ground floor, and she followed Danny's hasty strides out of the building and around the side of it, to an alley where a dumpster was overflowing with bulging garbage bags. "We haven't brought jumpsuits – " she began, but Danny had already put one hand on the metal rim and vaulted over the side.

"You look in the bags on the ground," he instructed her, and she complied, undoing knots tied with varying degrees of efficiency, and trying to only breathe through her mouth as she was assaulted by the heavy scent of rotting garbage.

"I thought you were on an active case?" she asked, clinging to the reality offered by normal conversation.

"I was," he said. His voice sounded as if he, too, was trying to limit the frequency that he was forced to inhale. "Hit a dead end for now. John Doe, no ID, no missing person report. Got to wait 'til one turns up. This is more important."

She nodded, and fleetingly wondered what the friends and family of John Doe would say to that. But he was dead, and Stella could be, might be, alive…

Her heart leapt as the bag she had opened slumped over, spilling out paper. But closer inspection caused her lips, which had parted in a breath of sudden hope, to close again in disappointment. Printed web pages, nothing more. And nothing useful; they seemed to all be tour guides to different parts of Spain. Her tidy mind pointed out that they should have been recycled, but she scooped them back into the bag, retied it, moved onto the next.

"Hey! Linds!" She looked up, and was nearly hit by the black bag which Danny tossed down to her, and then jumped down himself, reckless enthusiasm driving his movements.

"You've found something?" _Don't hope too much, not yet…_

"Maybe." He grabbed the underneath of the bag, tipping the contents out onto the floor. Coffee grounds, fruit peel, tea bags, chip packets, mixed with a milk carton, an empty sugar bag, mincemeat wrapping…

But they both disregarded the household detritus. Danny pounced on the blood-soaked section of carpet, folded roughly in half and clamped shut with garden twine wrapped around it several times. "Just like Flack said we were looking for." Lindsay was bagging the metal butter knife which had clanged on the hard ground with one of the plastic evidence bags she made a habit of carrying in her pockets, along with sets of gloves. "If Stella's prints are on the handle, this'll confirm what we think happened."

She laid it down, and began to sort through the rest of the trash, avoiding getting the kitchen waste on her gloves. A manilla card folder, again folded in half, caught her eye, and she crouched down to retrieve it. "This is one of ours."

Danny stopped in the act of fishing in his pocket for his cell. "What d'ya mean?"

"It's one of our case files. From the lab." She was aware of him crouching just behind her, his breath on his neck as he peered at it over her shoulder. She opened it. It was a case unfamiliar to her, but she thought that she remembered Mac and Stella discussing it. Their names were both listed on the first page. She flicked to the back. Mac had signed it, but the space for Stella's signature was blank, waiting.

"This must be what Mac was doing at Stella's," she said. "He must have been bringing it for her to sign, but Perry was there. And then Perry took it, along with the carpet, for whatever reason." She paused. "Nice of him, to leave all of this evidence in the same bag. Do you think he meant us to find it?"

"We can ask him." Danny's voice was grimly satisfied.

* * *

She was rationing the water. She had no idea how long it was supposed to last her for, although if she dared she would have drunk half the bottle in one swing. For most of the time she was dozing; not asleep, certainly not fully awake. She kept her arm around the bottle, kept it clutched close to her side, so that – he – couldn't remove it without her knowing.

Still no food, not since that single tasteless sandwich. How long ago was that? She couldn't tell. Had no way of telling. The memory of the one that she hadn't eaten, that she had saved only for it to be removed while she slept plagued her, haunted her. Gnawed at her, gnawed away painfully inside her stomach. _Three days without water, three weeks without food. Just ignore it._

Easy to say.

Her broken arm throbbed. Pain, all around her, all through her. Nothing to distract her from it. Only pain, a whole world of it.

All she could do was wait for the return of her gaoler. She was dependent on him, utterly, however much she hated the feeling.

She waited.


End file.
